The winner?

The green-feathered, red-capped parrots, which live wild in the city. Boisterous and full of personality, they’re interlopers who made San Francisco their home starting in the late 1980s, when some are believed to have escaped from a pet store.

They’ve long been iconic city residents, but this week, the birds scored a surprise win that may see them enshrined forever as a symbol of the world-famous city. Though the newspaper’s poll was just for fun, city supervisors have introduced legislation to make the results official.

The wild parrots’ victory is an underdog story, complete with shades of political intrigue and cultural history — but the tale also speaks to people’s search for levity after the hardships of the pandemic.

More than 27,000 people cast ballots in the Chronicle poll’s four rounds, with more than 8,000 participating in the final round. The city’s famous sea lions — which are native to San Francisco Bay and a draw for millions of tourists as they bask on the dock at Pier 39 — were the favorite to win.

However, the parrots squawked by with just 227 more votes than the sea lions, winning with 51 percent, Chronicle culture critic Peter Hartlaub reported Monday.

“The wild parrots really are the perfect metaphor for San Franciscans,” Hartlaub told The Washington Post. “I think about it like some of our greatest San Franciscans, that’s [their] story, too. Robin Williams was a wild parrot, Harvey Milk was a wild parrot.”

Hartlaub and Chronicle columnist Heather Knight, who host a podcast together, launched the project as a March Madness-inspired contest after realizing the city didn’t have an official animal.

The pair sometimes aim to cover stories that serve as reminders of San Francisco’s wonders, and Hartlaub, who often writes history columns, noted that the city has a tradition of finding joyfulness even in hard times. They weren’t sure whether the poll would be popular with readers, but they thought writing about animals would be fun.

“People are so down in general in San Francisco right now, with so many crises — homelessness and the fentanyl epidemic and affordability issues and still struggling to rebuild downtown,” said Knight, who covers many of those issues. “People are kind of eager for fun, happy stories, too, to remember why it is worth living in San Francisco.”

Still, the reporters were shocked, they told The Post on Tuesday, when word spread, official groups started taking sides and thousands of votes poured in. The results were surprising, too — seagulls were eliminated early, for instance — as was the board of supervisors’ swift legislation in response. They are set to vote next week.

The birds’ fame rose after the 2003 documentary “The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill,” in which filmmaker Judy Irving told the story of the birds’ relationship with Mark Bittner, a formerly homeless musician who began noticing the parrots in 1993. Though various urban legends exist as to how they ended up in the city, it’s considered likely that the flock started with birds that escaped from a pet store. Today they are found across the city, Irving said in an interview.

“This is kind of great recognition for the parrots that the city has accepted them as the colorful, vibrant immigrants that they are,” said Sarah Lemarié, chief executive of Mickaboo, a bird-rescue nonprofit that works with the parrot flock.

Some San Franciscans have never spotted one, Lemarié heard during the voting process — but “they’re easy to find. Just go to the park by the ferry building every morning, and they’ll be there.”

‘A classic political fight’

The bird-mammal matchup happened after voters had eliminated a nonagenarian lungfish, an endangered snake, a native blue butterfly and other candidates. Crabs, which are common in San Francisco Bay, and an albino alligator named Claude who resides at the California Academy of Sciences were in the final four.

The parrot flock consists of about 220 San Francisco-born birds, generations after the first red-masked parakeet, as the bird is called ornithologically, showed up toward the end of the 1980s. The birds, which are also known as cherry-headed conures, have bred with another species, the mitered parakeet, making the flock unique to San Francisco, Lemarié said.

The city bars people from feeding parrots, and advocates don’t want San Franciscans to take them home as pets. The parrots aren’t popular with everyone, Irving acknowledged, including those who favor native fauna.

Sea lions were the clear front-runner through three rounds of voting, with parrots holding a distant second, Hartlaub said. The marine mammals had such a lead that, at one point, Hartlaub checked to make sure the online ballot boxes weren’t being virtually stuffed.

Sea lions live up and down the West Coast; males migrate to San Francisco Bay in the spring and fall. They first came to Pier 39 after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, and took up residence on a newly completed dock that was unoccupied by boats, said Adam Ratner, associate director of conservation education for the Marine Mammal Center.

Many found the wild parrots symbolic of San Francisco’s spirit and kindred with the many people who move to the city. Sea lions, on the other hand, are the city’s sentinel, stationed at the water’s edge, and its ambassador, beckoning visitors to the marina with their affable barks.

“Each one really symbolized San Francisco in their own ways, so they kind of became the perfect final two,” Knight said. “Sea lions are natives, and native San Franciscans are really proud to be native San Franciscans. … [The parrots] are the newcomers to San Francisco who are not native but are very fun and colorful and loud.”

Pier 39 and other groups pushed for sea lions while Mickaboo, filmmaker Irving and others promoted the parrots.

At the Chronicle, Knight and Hartlaub watched the final votes come in over four suspenseful days last week, seeing the lead swing back and forth four or five times. With other animals eliminated, people opposed to sea lions united behind the wild parrots, the reporters theorized.

The parrot supporters began working hard to rustle up votes, said Irving, calling it an uphill battle. They were “frenzied” last week, with the race “rocking.”

“It was sort of a classic political fight, as well, because we felt that we were the spunky independents versus the, maybe you could call it the corporate tourism lobby,” Irving said. “It was fun.”

Mickaboo, which rescues parrots from the flock when they get sick or injured, had a volunteer walking the city streets with a cockatoo last week who wrangled nearly 100 votes, Lemarié said.

“We knew that sea lions had strong support, and we knew that the votes were really close with just a couple of days left to go,” she said. “We’re thrilled that we managed to scrape the win.”

A dramatic moment came when the city of San Francisco’s official Twitter account appeared to endorse sea lions, retweeting a Pier 39 post asking for people’s votes and adding, “Gotta love our @sfgov Sea Lions.”

Votes for sea lions shot up, but after parrot supporters “cried fowl,” as Hartlaub wrote on Twitter — city supervisor Aaron Peskin told The Post he’d protested the city’s “skulduggery” in potentially influencing votes — the city deleted the tweet.

Still, at one point, Hartlaub was so sure sea lions were going to win that he drafted his article crowning them victors. The next morning, when the parrots took the lead, he had to rewrite the story.

“It was a huge upset,” Hartlaub said. “And I had written the sea lions story, so it was a ‘Dewey defeats Truman’ moment with beloved San Francisco animals.”

On the other hand, city supervisor Myrna Melgar was so sure the birds would win that staff drafted the resolution ahead of time, she told the Chronicle. Melgar, whose family fled civil war in El Salvador, told Knight she lit candles Friday in hopes of the parrots’ win, saying the birds are “tropical beings like me who found refuge and freedom in San Francisco.”

“Much like those immigrants who settled and grew families in San Francisco, flocks of Wild Parrots that were imported to San Francisco have since bred new generations of San Francisco flocks,” the resolution reads. “The Wild Parrots of San Francisco have become a symbol of the city’s diversity, sociability, and resilience.”

Symbolic of spirit

If the resolution is passed by the city’s board of supervisors, it will need the mayor’s approval before the birds join the list of official city mascots — a flower, a Christmas tree, a band and more.

On Tuesday, Salty the Sea Lion, Pier 39’s mascot, posted a concession speech to Twitter: “On behalf of my sea lion friends here at K-Dock, we concede to the wild parrots of Telegraph Hill,” the sea lion says in an animated video.

“Although this is a hard herring bone to swallow right now … we’ll hold our flippers high.”

Though all sides acknowledged the contest was in good fun, the win held meaning for those intimately involved with the wild parrots. When Irving embarked on making “The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill,” she recalled, Bittner’s hope was to make the parrots so popular that the flock could never be removed from the city.

“I feel like, 20 years later, we have really sealed the deal on the parrots’ popularity,” said Irving, who is in the process of remastering the film for distribution to streaming services. “We’ve basically made it so that Mark’s initial wish is true now.”

It was a full-circle moment in another way, too: After making the documentary, Irving and Bittner got married. Their wedding was officiated by Peskin — who is now the president of the city’s board of supervisors. On Tuesday, he co-sponsored Melgar’s resolution to make parrots the city’s official animal.

Peskin has lived for decades on Telegraph Hill, where he watches the parrots from his home. Though he praised sea lions, he admitted he’d taken sides in the contest: “I ultimately threw down for the parrots,” said the supervisor, who had a “Parrots for Peskin” poster when he ran for office.

“When you see these birds flying in unison or gathered in a tree upside-down,” Peskin told The Post, “it is just a little moment that changes your day and reminds you that you live in a beautiful world.”

Both sea lion and wild parrot lovers said the contest helped raise awareness for the creatures. Sea lions can be threatened by plastic pollution and anything else that harms oceans, while a certain number of wild parrots are sickened each year by rat poison used by residents.

Mickaboo, which spends thousands on rescuing the birds each year, asks residents not to scatter rat poison freely, especially on roofs.

At the Marine Mammal Center, which has the world’s largest hospital for such animals, Ratner urged people passionate about the contest to support other conservation measures. “We’re going to stay Team Sea Lion, but … whether it’s the parrots, whether it’s the sea lions, there’s so much we can do to support these animals.”

Though Salty conceded and Ratner said his contingent had no plans to lobby the board of supervisors to reconsider, it’s not over until it’s over: At the Chronicle, Knight and Hartlaub will be covering the board of supervisors’ vote next week.

“Politics in San Francisco can be really animated, would be a nice way to put it,” Knight said. “So I would not be surprised if something crazy happens.”