Mokka mit Schlag

As Michael Harrington told me back in 1984–hoping for a Mondale victory–if he wins, tonight we celebrate. Tomorrow we start organizing to keep him honest. Like Jimmy Carter and John Kennedy, I fully expect Obama to talk a much different game than he plays.

For all the wingnut fears about a vast left-wing liberal agenda over the next four-eight years, it’s worth remembering that like Clinton before him, Obama is slightly to the right of Richard Nixon. In any other Western democracy he’d be considered somewhere from a moderate to a hard right-winger. That Obama’s considered a liberal is simply a measure of how far to the right this country has swung in the last 30 years. Not that this isn’t a victory, or an important one, but it’s small change in direction, not a large one.
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Voting in California is sure a lot more exciting than in Brooklyn. There’s a lot more to vote for here, and the outcome doesn’t seem like a foregone conclusion. (In my Brooklyn district, the Democratic machine just wins, every single time, with perhaps one notable exception when a quirk of election law briefly put control of the nomination in the hands of a murdered city councilman’s mother.) Here in Irvine we get to vote on 14 different propositions.

Of course they’re the statewide propositions. You’ve all heard about Prop 8, I’m sure, but there are 11 others on the ballot. In California various interest groups get together to buy laws with disinformation. For instance, T. Boone Pickens is pushing Prop 10, a measure to give about five billion dollars of taxpayer money to natural gas and trucking companies. Of course, if you phrase it like that no one would vote for it, so instead it’s disguised as an environmental measure. It isn’t. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Prop 7 is another weird one that seems to be about the environment. This one I don’t really understand, but the Sierra Club says no, so I’ll vote against it.
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So I went back to Santiago Oaks yesterday to find another one. This is an Armyworm Moth, Mythimna unipuncta, Hodges#10438, which I found about 7:15 A.M outside the restrooms. Thanks to Steve Nanz for this ID.

However this may be my last moth for a while. I don’t have any remaining publication quality (even blog quality) photos of moths, and the winter months are not great for moths, though just maybe I can scare up one or two more. Maybe if I put up a black light?
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Apparently more people than I thought are reading this since someone actually noticed when I didn’t put up a moth yesterday. So a day late, here’s the weekly moth, another Underwing from Irvine Regional Park:

Catocala californica?
Irvine Regional Park, Orange County, California, USA
September 3, 2008
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I haven’t done a lot of rarity chasing this year. Coming from Brooklyn, there’s not a lot of excitement in finding a Yellow-breasted Sapsucker, an American Redstart, or an American Tree Sparrow, all of which are common park birds back east. Instead I’ve been focusing on local western birds that are still lifers for me such as Black Turnstone and Surfbird. However when I heard about a Painted Redstart over in Bonelli Regional Park, that seemed worth chasing. It’s a common southern Arizona bird, but doesn’t show up much elsewhere. However this one seems to be pretty reliable, and it’s less than an hour away from Irvine.

I got to the park about 8:30 this morning, and after getting a little lost–I think I was driving down a horse trail–I eventually located the correct parking lot. I luckily stumbled on the monthly bird walk at Bonelli park, and they helpfully pointed me to the correct tree in which to look. They’d already seen the Redstart. I drove to the other end of the parking lot, and scanned the tree. House Finches were singing noisily, but no Redstart. I walked across the road and picked up Hutton’s Vireo, and then came back to the Oak. About 10 minutes later, the redstart flies in with a quick “Che-wee. Che-wee”.

I got a brief look at it, before it disappeared again into the middle of the foliage. It’s a striking and unmistakeable bird though. Then, about a minute later, it burst out again with a lot more calling and activity, and I was able to grab some pictures and study it a bit.

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A friendly suggestion for local Audubon and Sierra Club chapters and bird clubs everywhere: When posting directions for field trips, please try to provide the nearest possible full street address. These days many of us are using GPS systems, and when wandering through a strange city, it’s a lot easier to find an address such as “120 Via Verde, San Dimas, CA” than to follow directions like, “From the Pasadena (110) Freeway, exit Orange Grove Ave, and proceed south across Mission St. (where Orange Grove jogs to the right) to El Centro St. Turn west (right) on El Centro and park in the first block.”

By all means give the directions too for those folks who aren’t using a GPS. And sometimes, there just aren’t any street addresses anywhere near the meeting site. But when you’re birding in a major metro area like Los Angeles, the street address helps a lot.