Three African penguin checks who join the penguin exhibit at the Academy of Sciences today still need names! Well, two of them do anyway.
The youngest, hatched in December, has already been named Marcus. But a male and a female, born a few weeks earlier, will get their names by public vote. They join a 14-bird colony at the museum, which has made special effort to restore the dwindling African penguin population.
You can watch the exhibit live on the Academy's live penguin cams, and you can vote on their names here. The museum gathered some nominations from friends at other local museums, so the possible names for the male chick are Bert (submitted by the Walt Disney Museum, in honor of the character played by Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins who danced with animated penguins), Bufano (submitted by the Oakland Museum in honor of Beniamino Bufano, a sculptor whose Penguin’s Prayer is on view in the Academy’s East Garden), and Ebb (submitted by the Exploratorium).
Possible female names are Nori (submitted by the Asian Art Museum), Stella (submitted by the de Young Museum, in honor of artist Frank Stella), and Pina (submitted by the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, in honor of modern dance choreographer Pina Bausch).