Ready, set, vote! Here are your choices to name Berkeley’s new falcon quadruplets.

Your suggestions are in to name the four new falcon chicks at UC Berkeley, and four sets of names chosen as finalists by Cal Falcons now need your vote. Vote via this form by the end of this Wednesday, May 22; the winning set will be announced Thursday.  

About 650 people proposed names for Annie and Archie’s quadruplets via Cal Falcons’ social media sites, and through a partnership with Berkeley Public Library, 150 children also suggested sets of names. Outdoor-related themes were popular this year, said Sean Peterson, an ecologist for Cal Falcons. 

“I think a lot of people had fun with the Earth Day birthday for three of the chicks,” he said. Offspring of falcon parents Annie and Archie, the first three chicks hatched in their nest on the Campanile on Earth Day, April 22, and the fourth on April 24.

Here are the finalists:       

• Equinox (Knox), Solstice (Sol), Eclipse, Aurora        
• Alder, Madrone, Aster, Myrtle — Bay Area native flora
• Beezus, Ramona, Henry, Ralph — Characters created by Beverly Cleary, an author of children’s and young adult fiction. She received a B.A. in English from Berkeley in 1938 and died in 2021 at age 104.      
• Pam the Funkstress (an East Bay DJ who died in 2017), Lucky, Tyranta (short for Tyrannosaurus Rex), Sunny — names proposed by kids and chosen by Berkeley Public Library librarians.

Three of the four chicks already have wandered from the nest box to explore the rest of the level of the bell tower that is their home. Previously, they’d been leaving the nest accidentally, “by kind of tripping and falling out,” said Peterson. 

Meanwhile, on Alcatraz Island, the four chicks produced by Larry (Lawrencium), one of Annie’s chicks from 2018, are expected to take their first flights next week, ahead of the Berkeley chicks by about a week.