I’ve been home sick with a stomach bug for the past two days. Entertaining me during this time was a hungry squirrel pulling off some serious ninja skills by climbing up our window and onto one of our bird feeders. The squirrel had been trying for days and apparently finally found a way to do it. It surprised me yesterday, and by the time I got my camera, it had left and didn’t return. Today I was better prepared and managed to catch the little acrobat on four successful attempts.

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The winter has been very mild so far, with little snow and midday temperatures no lower than -5 °C (23 °F) or so. My memories from last year are filled with ankle-deep blankets of snow lingering for days at -15 °C (5 °F). Going through older blog entries, I can see we had those conditions (and worse), but not until February. The first two weeks after my arrival on January 3rd, 2011, were not much more wintery than the weather right now.

Of course, that’s not to say it isn’t winter, and nature has responded in her usual way of bare trees and birds migrating to warmer climes. Melissa and I put up a bird feeder outside the living room window, and the birds that haven’t left are making good use of it—especially when it snows. There’s a flock of sparrows spending the nights in a cedar bush next to the house and every morning they head over to the feeder for breakfast. The record so far is nine sparrows sitting down at once, accompanied by much squeaking and wing-flapping. Sparrows may look cute, but they’re quite vicious: they keep trying to push each other off, sometimes flying up from a little distance and knocking another, sometimes pecking at one another with their little beaks.

Other visitors to the feeder include a couple of chickadees and five or six cardinals (three male, two or three female) and, rather surprisingly, a hairy woodpecker (haarspecht). The hairy is a medium-sized woodpecker, growing to about 25 cm or 10 in. The feeder is shaped like a tube and is maybe 40 cm (16 in) tall, so the hairy woodpecker pretty much dwarfed the thing and was unable to get much out of it. It sat on the feeder for a while, undecisive, before flying off again. We haven’t seen it since, but we liked it so much that we’re going to put up a larger feeder to try and attract more of its kind.

Speaking of woodpeckers, I went out for a walk yesterday at Parker Mill Park (just east of AA) and spotted a red-bellied woodpecker (roodbuikspecht):

Let me take this opportunity to point out that bird names, in my opinion at least, do not always make sense. The red-bellied’s belly isn’t really red, nor is the hairy’s plumage in any way hairy. If an ornithologist or other expert happens to read this, feel free to enlighten me.

Click here for some more recent bird pictures…

Fall colors in Gallup Park. More pictures here.

The Horseshoe Falls at Niagara Falls.

The American Falls and Bridal Veil Falls at night. More pictures here.

Toledo, Spain. This is where I was last week for an astronomy conference.

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A little noisy, but not bad for a night panorama without a tripod.

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One of my uncles has been digging into the family history to see how far back he can trace our ancestry. Pretty far, it turns out, in particular on my paternal grandmother’s side. My uncle (her youngest son) managed to go back seven generations from my grandmother, to a certain Govert Claeszoon Boekesteyn born in 1677. Googling, I found a genealogy website where some distant relatives had dug even deeper, extending the direct lineage by another four generations. That’s a total of 13 generations up from me, all the way back to the mid-16th century. My great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather was called Claes Pieterszoon Verhouck and he was probably born in 1555. His middle name means Pieter’s son (just like the English Peterson), so we can reliably say what my 14th-generation ancestor was called.

Why can my paternal grandmother’s family be traced back so much farther than that of my other three grandparents? Well, for one thing, her maiden name, Boekestein (pronounced approximately as book-eh-stine), is a pretty rare surname, so there’s not so many false positives when searching old records. For another, her ancestors stayed in the same small village for many generations. Finally, it looks like the family had fairly high standing in the 16th and 17th centuries: they lived in a large house (more on that later) and my 12th ancestor was a member of what would nowadays be called the city council. As such, there are a relatively large number of records (sales acts, titles, wills) in which the family name appears.

Based on the information my uncle gathered, and on what I found in related family trees, here’s the full list of 13 generations of my direct ancestors. My parents and grandparents are still alive, so for reasons of privacy, I’m not giving their full names.

0. me (surname Visser)
1. my parents
2. my paternal grandfather (surname Visser) and grandmother (maiden name Boekestein)
3. Cornelis Boekestein (1900-1983) and Hendrika Catharina Zwart (1903-1988)
4. Pieter Boekestein (1851-1905) and Jansje Boxman (1858-1942)
5. Adrianus Boekestein (1815-1857) and Trijntje Heijer (1810-1883)
6. Pieter Boekestein (1785-1821) and Johanna Kinas (1787-?)
7. Abraham Boekestein (1754-1817) and Neeltje Vroom (1755-1832)
8. Pieter Govertszn. Boekestein (1720-1806) and Heiltje Abrahamsdr. van Dorp (1719-1788)
9. Govert Claeszn. Boekestein (1677-1725) and Baaltje Michielsdr. van der Meyde (1674-1773)
10. Claes Pieterszn. Boekestein (1639-1682) and Marrigje Govertsdr. van der Maas (1643-1719)
11. Pieter Pieterszn. Boekestein (1614-1655) and Maartje Willemsdr. van Sant (1616-?)
12. Pieter Claeszn. Verhouck (1580-1652) and Pleuntgen Aryensdr. Backer (1580-1640)
13. Claes Pieterszn. Verhouck (1555-1626) and Maritgen Jorisdr. (1556-1635)

Dutch names commonly included a patronym or matronym until the early 19th century, hence the abbreviations “zn.” (zoon, son) and “dr.” (dochter, daughter). Spelling of names was flexible before the 19th century, yielding variations like Boekestijn, Boekesteyn and Boeckesteyn. (In Dutch, ij is a diphtong closely related to y.) I kept it simple here and used only the modern spelling.

Going through the list, it’s clear the family had a liking for the name Pieter (pronounced Peter): including the unlisted father of the 13th ancestor, it appears six times. (It also happens to be my father’s middle name, but that one derives from his paternal grandfather. Coincidence? Yes and no. Like Peter in English, Pieter in Dutch is simply a very common name.)

Of greater interest is the change in surname between ancestors 12 and 11. Remember that “city council member” I mentioned above? That piece of information comes from documents quoted in one of the other family trees I found. Pieter Claeszoon Verhouck was schepen of his hometown De Lier (pronounced roughly as the titular character in Shakespeare’s “King Lear”). According to a written history of the region, De Lier had a couple of fortified houses in the middle ages, and one of them was called Boekestein. Although there don’t appear to be any surviving records linking Pieter Verhouck to the Boekestein house, it’s likely he lived there. In any case, all of his seven children adopted the surname Boekestein. The family stayed in De Lier for the next few generations, some of them quite possibly living in the same house, and the name stuck.

I haven’t found any evidence of what the name means, so I’ll speculate. The second half, stein, is related to modern Dutch steen and English stone and simply means house, or something a little stronger. For the first half, I see three possibilities. The first one is to link boek(e) to modern Dutch boek and English book, which would suggest the family was known for its collection of books. The second and third possibilities relate boek(e) to modern Dutch bok, which has two different meanings: it could be a male goat (related to English buck) or the driver’s seat of a horse-drawn carriage (English box). This would suggest the family had made their fame as goat farmers or as builders, or drivers, of carriages. However, the etymology of bok in the dictionary shows no spellings with oe, so I favor the first explanation. In which case the family name essentially means library. Of course, I’m neither a linguist nor a historian, so I could be totally wrong.

In contrast to the name Boekestein, my own last name (meaning fisherman) is very common in Dutch, making it much harder to trace the lineage on that branch of the family. Combining information from my uncle and from public civil records, I can only recover five generations:

0. me
1. my parents
2. my paternal grandparents
3. Pieter Visser (1903-1987) and Emma Maria Rooth (1904-1999)
4. Klaas Visser (1864-1939) and Etje Jonker (1866-?)
5. Jan Visser (?-?) and Geertruida Maarssen (?-?)

It was a cold day in Hell yesterday. Not quite to the point that Hell had frozen over, but cold enough that you’d want a good coat and a pair of gloves. At least the sun was shining, so it looked pleasant enough for a visit.

Many misconceptions exist about Hell. You’ve probably heard that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Right? Forget it. The road to Hell actually isn’t paved at all. It’s packed dirt:

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A Canada goose enters the water at sunset.

Winter isn’t over yet, but signs of its impending end are getting stronger. It’s no longer 0 °F or -20 °C at night—it’s only 15 °F or -10 °C. Five- and ten-inch snow storms have made way for two-inch storms mixed with an inch of rain. And birds that spent the winter down south are migrating back to their breeding grounds up north. Some of them stop over in Michigan for a day or two, where the ice on lakes and rivers is just melting. The opening waters also draw birds that live here year round out of hiding. It made Ann Arbor’s Geddes Pond a rewarding place to visit with my camera yesterday.

Close-up of a trumpeter swan.

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