You Ask: What Does "Codornices" Mean (And How Do You Say It)?

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There’s a creek by the name, of course, percolating from the hills toward the bay. And an Albany veterinarian’s clinic and a popular Berkeley park. 

So what does “codornices” mean, asks Albany Patch reader Ken Wait. And, he adds, how is it pronounced?

Hundreds of years ago, when Oholone Indians hunted elk and collected shellfish in their East Bay homeland, numerous small creeks bubbled down from the hills to the San Francisco Bay.

The Indians often built settlements along the creeks, drawn to the drinking water and nutritional bounty of the bay waters. So did the Spanish soldiers and explorers who claimed the land in the late 1700s and early 1800s -- a colonisation that ultimately led to the demise of the Ohlone. 

Sometime after 1820, so the story goes, the sons of one of these rancheros, Luis Maria Peralta, a retired Mexican soldier whose land grant from the Spanish crown stretched from San Leandro to El Cerrito (Rancho San Antonio), were exploring their family’s expanse and happed upon a pocket of quail eggs near the bank of a small creek.

And so the boys declared the waterway “Codornices" (co-dor-nee-ces), the Spanish word for the plural of quail. The singular, or one quail, is codorniz (co-dor-neese).

“I can't swear to that story, but it does seem clear that it was named by the Peraltas,” said Susan Schwartz, long-time president of the nonprofit Friends of Five Creeks, which counts Codornices as one of its treasures.

Schwartz has pulled together a detailed history of the creek, which drains about 2.9 miles from the Berkeley Hills across the flatlands, forming the Berkeley-Albany border. (Read the full history in the PDF to the right.) The creek is also mentioned in this comprehensive history of Berkeley written by Charles Wollenberg. 

Based on historical maps, Codornices is the only Berkeley creek that still largely follows its natural course. It petered out in salty marshlands around today's race track, never reaching the bay.

According to Schwartz's research, one of Luis Peralta's sons, Jose Domingo Peralta, ended up building his home along Codornices, a traditional adobe, around today's Albina Street in Berkeley - perhaps near the very spot where he discovered the small eggs that gave the creek its name. 

He probably didn't know that 150 years in the future, a dedicated group of community volunteers, the Codornices Creek Watershed Council, would take it upon themselves to work for the beauty and health of the little stream he called home. 

Fun Facts:

• Codornices has its own Facebook page.
• Quail statues adorn the pedestrian/bicycle bridge over Codornices on the Ohlone Greenway under the Bart tracks.
• The creek was in a collaboration between Albany, Berkeley and the University of California at Berkeley.
• Friends of Five creeks sometimes , and other chances to help maintain the area.

Do you have any Codornices stories to share? What other local place names intrigue you? Albany Patch will try to investigate. Tell us in the comments.

Everybody makes mistakes ... ! If there's something in this article you think should be corrected, or if something else is amiss, call editor Emilie Raguso at 510-459-8325 or email her at emilier@patch.com.

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