Our local jay was named to memorialize Georg Wilhelm Steller, an
impressively adventurous German naturalist who accompanied Vitus Bering
when the Russian government hired him to find out whether Siberia and
Alaska were separate or joined. Those guys were hardier than us by
several orders of magnitude, but neither made it home. Georg's good luck
was to see (and name for science) the now extinct Steller's Sea Cow. His
bad luck was to croak in Tiumen', a place that is barely on the map in
Siberia. Our jay is a resplendent bird, but hardly stellar - and Georg S.
may be extinct, but his name lives on in our backyards.

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JAMES WEST Slavic Dept. Univ. of Washington DP-32 Seattle, WA 98195
Tel: 206-543-4829 Fax: 206-543-9285 E-mail: jdwest at u.washington.edu