iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

New damage-resistant knitting pattern discovered using maths! I’m slightly disappointed there’s no nice image of the actual knit, other than a tiny photo of how defect propagation is limited. Diagram (b) and photo (e) show the robust knit. It doesn’t look simple, but I Am Not A Knitter.

Four diagrams showing knitting stitches. The one labelled b at the top left is the new “robust knit”, and the photos at the bottom right labelled e show how four defects in one row, produce three in the row below, then two, then one, then the damage is stopped.

Conversely, the photos at the bottom left labelled d show a conventional jersey knit with a single defect, and show how this defect can propagate into every row below it in a continuous “ladder”.

Diagram c shows a “fragile knit” where a single defect produces two on the row below, causing increasing amounts of damage even worse than their jersey knit ladder.

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etc @etchachan.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Fun new bluesky failure. Couldn’t log in to bluesky itself or view my profile on clearsky, but it was visible on bluesky and blacksky. Seems a bit careless to break with such an unhelpful error.

A cropped screenshot of the bluesky login page on my mobile phone. Beneath my username is the error “We couldn’t find an account with that username. Please check that you’ve typed it correctly, or set your hosting provider manually.”

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etc @etchachan.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

It’s a good year for cyclamen. #bloomscrolling

$A big patch of pinky-purple cyclamen flowers growing through a layer of pale and brown chert gravel under an apple tree. There’s a red-brick wall in the background and a number of other small leafy non-flowering plants, but only a couple of cyclamen leaves have actually pushed through the gravel to show their distinctive green patterning that reminds me of a Mandelbrot fractal.$

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etc @etchachan.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Male and female ivy bee, the last two leaving a mating ball. These are solitary ground-dwelling miner bees but they like living near others of their species so they can form large (but generally harmless) swarms on earth banks. #bee #insect

A small male ivy bee, seen side on and climbing on to the abdomen of a larger female ivy bee, seen from the top and holing on to some blades of grass. These bees have hairless yellow and black striped abdomens with slightly broader black stripes, and fuzzy yellow orange thoraces.

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etc @etchachan.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

The place I’m currently staying in is an old converted concrete water tower. I’m on the top floor, and the cap of the tower is above my bed, resembling an unfocused cyclopean eye with pinpoint pupil. No-one else has mentioned this, but I’m finding it a little unsettling. #concrete #eye #pareidolia

A view from the inside of a converted concrete water tower towards the top. The walls have been painted white, but the round roof surface has been left as plain concrete, with a circular steel cover at the very centre. Rusty stains radiate out from the centre and along with the naturally mottled appearance of the concrete it resembles a giant eye with an unblemished white sclera, grey iris and contracted pupil. A dark brown wooden mezzanine intrudes along the top of the image obscuring part of the roof, and looks a little like an eyelid in this context.

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etc @etchachan.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

Cheap tourist destination is now filled with gen ai garbage. Here’s the worst example 🙁 The sheer lack of shits given by the people who manufactured this slop, the people who purchased it and the people who fitted it is just so disheartening.

An artificially aged enamel sign that probably wanted to say that the surf is up, with a painting of a surfboard against a background of beach and surf and palm fronds.

What it actually looks like is the text SUFF’S UP with the two effs weirdly smooshed together. In smaller writing in the rusty bottom border can be read “SUMCEF SUF”. The surf sort of disintegrates into diagonal stripes on the right hand side where the llm got confused with palm fronds. The whole effect looks terrible even for ai artwork.

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etc @etchachan.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

I love the texture of corbelled roofs. This one is in a dry stone hut (sometimes called a borie these days) possibly built by occitan herdspeople originally, but has had some modern maintenance #drystone

A view from inside a round dry stone hut, looking up at the apex of the corbelled stone roof. There’s no wood, only each successive layer of creamy-brown coloured limestone slabs set slightly in from the last to make a cone, with a larger flat slab overnight the very tip.

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etc @etchachan.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

An alpine pasture full of crocuses (probably colchicum montana rather than proper crocuses) with the peaks of big and little astazu in the background (little astazu appearing to be higher from this viewpoint). #wildflowers #bloomscrolling

A photograph where the bottom half is a green alpine pasture seemingly covered with purple crocus flowers. These are sheet and as all but in the distance, but they’re indistinct. Tree covered mountain slopes give way to rocky mountains with steep cliff faces and small snow patches even in august, beneath a blue and grey sky.

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etc @etchachan.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

Monkshood, on a mountainside above the cirque de gavarnie. Excitingly poisonous, as apparently even touching it can cause neurotoxic effects. Very pretty though. #wildflowers #bloomscrolling

A bloom of monkshood, with a couple of dozen deep purple blue flowers above feathery green leaves against a grey lichen-speckled limestone rock. The out-of-focus background shows a meadow with distant livestock against a dark green forest in the distance.

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etc @etchachan.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Me: wow! That’s the first time I’ve ever seen a wild carnivorous plant, and it’s different to the ones I’ve heard of Wikipedia: this is what common butterwort looks like Me: oh, I saw one of those in may by a stream in north eryri and had no idea 😳 #carnivorousplants #wildflowers #bloomscrolling

A pair of common butterwort plants tucked in close together on grey lichen-speckled rock. The plants have short, roundish pale yellow-green leaves which are curled up widthways. Each has produced a flower with a long and slightly hairy stalk, to keep it well clear of the leaves. The flowers are asymmetric and look slightly squashed, with five petals which are pinkish white inside at their base, and purple outside and at the tips.

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etc @etchachan.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

An unexpected find spotted by my partner on a dry limestone cliff face, 2000m up in the mountains. Long-leafed butterwort, endemic to a fairly small portion of the pyrenees. The leaves are sticky, and secrete digestive enzymes when prey gets stuck. #carnivorousplants #pyrenees

A somewhat straggly long-leafed butterwort plant on a limestone cliff face. The leaves are a pale yellow green and speckled with the husks of tiny flies that were trapped and digested. It is looking a little dry and shrivelled, and some of the leaves have crispy brown tips. A number of thin dry flower stalks are also present, long enough to keep pollinators well clear of the leaves. One small dry blue flower remains.

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etc @etchachan.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

The ceiling of the chancel of the église saint robert, a 12th century fortified church. The nave (the 2/3rds where people might normally sit) was destroyed in the wars of religion, so this bit feels a bit small and very high-ceilinged now.

A look directly upwards at the ceiling of the chancel of a medieval fortified christian church. There are 7 tall limestone archways arranged in a semicircle around the top of the image around a plain white ceiling with several small windows showing blue sky. Each archway opens into a larger white ceilings space outside of the chancel proper. The lower part of the image is much darker, though a beam of sunlight is casting a bright splash on the lower right wall.

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etc @etchachan.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

Swallowtail caterpillar on a wild parsnip. #insect #caterpillar

A large-ish, but possibly not yet fully grown swallowtail caterpillar resting in the stalk of a wild parsnip. The caterpillar has a segmented pale green body, with each segment separated from the next by a thin black line, and small alternating orange and black markings are found along circumference of each segment. There’s a tall thin fluffy grass flower next to it, and out-of-focus yellow parsnip flowers and broad flat seed heads visible in the background.

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etc @etchachan.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

Things my camera can’t do, part 91: eclipses. It hides manual focus control from the users for no good reason, and third party camera apps that have it are otherwise garbage, so all I got was overexposed blur. Instead, have some improvised pinhole images using a couple of draining spoons. #eclipse

A slice of paper, creamy coloured in the evening eclipse light, with the shadows cast by two perforated draining spoons. Each round hole in the spoons is casting a crescent shaped spot, caused by a partial eclipse of the sun.

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etc @etchachan.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

Frog! I’m not actually sure what kind… I was thinking common frog, but the leg patterns look more like an agile frog. #frog #amphibian

A front-on view of a smallish frog, largely submerged in water but with its eyes and nose above the surface. It is a mostly greenish-brownish-tan colour with fine black speckles, but longer and thinner black stripes on its legs.

The cloudy afternoon sky is reflected in the water behind it, and something large and bright red is reflecting off the right-hand side of its very wet head.

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etc @etchachan.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

Four hearts twice. #refraction #reflection

$Heart-shaped light artefacts from different optical effects, in two staggered columns of four. Two heart-shaped cut-outs in wooden window shutters let in beams of light that strike dusty window panes, then is reflected back onto the inside of the shutters and finally at the bottom an upside-down copy of the original light caused by refraction within the camera lens.$

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etc @etchachan.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

Shoutout to ign.es, who will let you generate and download reasonably sized and detailed pdf maps for free via their mapa a la carta service. Surprisingly reasonable.

A map of a portion of the pyrenees including the peaks of marboré and gran astazu, and the lake ibón de marmorés.

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etc @etchachan.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

The lawn, such as it is, is a bit parched now and the wildflowers there are all but over. The driveway escapes the afternoon sun and is mostly made of gravel, and has a different selection of plants some of which are still flowering. Some details in alt text. #bloomscrolling #wildflowers

Viper’s bugloss (pronounced “boo gloss”, for “ox tongue”) presenting a cloud of blue flowers with long stamens against dense dark green foliage. Some flower parts are a bright ink, but there are only a few on snot, and they’re out of focus.

A lesser knapweed flower. This is a bundle of long florets, pale purple at the base and dark purple at the tip, looking a bit like a pompom. A few long slender green leaves are visible against the gravel in the background.

A lone herb-robert flower, with five rounded symmetrical petals that are white at the base and pinkish at the rims. The central cluster of stamens is just visible as a small orangey structure. This is mostly over, and there are several pale brown spike-shaped seed heads visible.

A few tiny white bedstraw flowers with distinct cross-shaped four-petalled blossoms with narrow petals ending in a fine tip and four long stamens ending in tiny yellow anthers. The leaves are arranged in rings of six about the stem, long and glossy dark green with a pointy tip.

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etc @etchachan.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

Eurosky.social making it clear they’ve not forgotten brexit, and that there’s only one kind of english they care about. Odd choice of languages for a presumably euro-centric platform, though.

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etc @etchachan.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

A toadflax brocade caterpillar, one of half a dozen munching on a large purple toadflax. I did have a bunch of photos of other species of caterpillars, but they were all blurry messes thanks to the usual iphone focus issues. Might try again tomorrow if they’re still there. #caterpillar

A toadflax brocade caterpillar, head down, on the stalk of some purple toadflax which seems to have finished flowering before it started getting chewed on. The caterpillar has a pale green base colour with a regular pattern of black and yellow spots along its side and a much more dense strip of broad black splotches along its back. It is no.ding on by four pairs of chunky conical prolegs, and an additional pair at its rear end, and its much more delicate true legs appear to be hanging down.

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etc @etchachan.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

Some butterflies from the edge of dartmoor. It’s a lot greener down there, so the plants and insects seem much happier. Still fighting with the iphone focusing on backgrounds instead of flowers and insects, though some come out okay. Details, such as they are, in the alt text. #insect #butterfly

A female spotted wood butterfly, perched on a young green bramble leaf over a path, wings open. Her wings are brown and faintly mottled, with the hindwing bearing three eyespots at the scalloped trailing edge, and the forewing having a single eyespot and a number of small white patches.

A clouded yellow butterfly on a knapweed flower. The butterfly’s hindwing has a green-yellow colour with faint veins and a single small white eyespot outlined in black, whilst the forewing is a much more golden yellow with several small black spots. The wings are closed, and apparently this genus never opens them at rest. The flower is a strong magenta-purple colour with many little florets in a tuft sticking out of a dark brown body. The background is an out-of-focus green meadow with other yellow and purple flowers.

A male meadow brown butterfly on some ragwort flowers. His hindwing has a few shades of dusty brown, but the foreign has a just-visible orange region with a black eyespot that appears to have white catchlights. The long tongue is visible, but coiled up just below the head. The ragwort flowers form a continuous mat across the centre of the image, and have a circle of long thin petals like a daisy (but yellow, not white) and a fuzzy dark orange centre.

A small copper butterfly, wings open, on the same ragwort as the meadow brown. The hindwing are brown and have an orange trailing edge with four black spots right on the edge, whereas the forewings have a broad brown border with an orange centre with a number of black spots. The body is a darker brown, and faintly fuzzy, though the fine details are lost in this photograph.

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etc @etchachan.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

This #bumblebee seems to have fallen asleep with its tongue out.

A bumblebee resting on a white wild carrot flower head. It is sitting quite still and ignored my approach. Its mouthparts are extended and stuck into one of the florets, like someone falling asleep with a straw in their mouth.

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etc @etchachan.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

The weather has cooled a bit, so I tidied up some of the lawn having left it to its own devices for three months. We haven’t had rain in weeks, but the wildflowers are still going, and there’s even a species I’ve not seen in the garden before, a salsify! #bloomscrolling #wildflowers

A salsify! I can’t remember having seen one of these in our garden before, so that’s exciting. The flower itself has the classic dandelion look, with broader and flatter outer yellow petals and a dense cluster of small yellow florets in the middle. The yellow stamens have a dark brownish base.

Unlike a dandelion, there’s a ring of 8 long and thin green leaves around the base of the flower.

Ladies bedstraw. It has very tiny cross-shaped flowers that look a lot like other species of galium, but they’re bright yellow. They’re rich in coumarin, which gives it a nice smell and is also toxic to rodents, which is why they were used for stuffing medieval mattresses.

A hawksbeard, probably? It’s certainly got the chicory flower look, with lots of broad flat yellow petals, it no central mass of florets like a dandelion.

Fennel, but not the kind that produces the edible leaf bulb thing. It is an umbellifer in the same species as the wild carrots but has a much more sparse umbel with fewer and wider-spaced clumps of small round yellow flowers each of which produced 1-4 long yellow stamens.

It’s much larger than the other flowers… it’s mostly over 2m tall here, and this is the first flowering shoot that’s only a metre high.

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etc @etchachan.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

I found an isolated ragwort with four cinnabar caterpillars on it not far from my house, and feeling sad that the caterpillar in my garden got eaten I stole one and brought it home. They can turn cannibal when short of food, so maybe this will reduce the chance of that. #caterpillar #wildflower

A large cluster of yellow ragwort flowers, and one small black and yellow striped cinnabar moth caterpillar.

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etc @etchachan.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

We have two tiny ponds. The one I didn’t put the beetle in is currently occupied by a small common #frog.

A small common frog, in a shallow pool, frames by green vegetation and a few small shed purple petals from a flower. The frog is a sort of buff colour mottled with large black patches and speckled with smaller and fainter black dots. The head protrudes from the water, and one eye is watching me carefully in case I get too close.

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etc @etchachan.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

Today’s surprise insect: a lesser diving beetle. They can fly! I never knew. This one fell out of the sky and bounced off my head, and made half-hearted efforts to burrow into the driveway. I put it in one of our tiny ponds where it seems happier. As usual, more info in alt text. #insect #beetle

A female lesser diving beetle, resting on some chert gravel. Her hind legs are quite long and chunky and bristly and are used for swimming. Her body is oval and a very dark brown, with longitudinal grooves on the wing cases (elytra) filled with short paler brown hairs. She has two thin antennae and round black eyes .

The fuzzy stripes on the elytra are part of some kind of adversarial mating strategy… the males have suction cups to hang on to the slippery females, but that is apparently bad for the female as it makes it more likely they’ll get eaten by predators, so they make themselves as hard to hold on to as possible to speed up their escape.

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etc @etchachan.bsky.social · 12/07/2026

A company called ”fuxtec” with a fox head logo seems like something that should appear in furry porn, not in real life selling trolleys and lawn mowers. fuxtec.co.uk

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etc @etchachan.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

Oh, the post creator can do the right thing. Even the reply popup does the right thing! But the regular post viewer? GET LANDSCAPED, IDIOT.

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etc @etchachan.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

No-mow-may, didn’t-want-to-mow-june, and now too-hot-to-mow-july. The oxeyes are mostly over, but we have wild carrots now which are nice, even if they aren’t quite as pretty. #bloomscrolling #wildflowers

Wild carrot flower head, still unfurling. The flower head is a dense mat of many tiny white flowers on their own fine stalks, in a vaguely umbrella-like style, forming a flattish round mat. There’s a line dark purple floret in the very centre.

Field scabious. Probably my favourite wild flower, with many delicate purple petals around a dense cluster of pale purple, almost white florets, which produce tiny pink and purple stamens

$Another wild carry flower, which is opening put on a fractal-like way, with small individual umbrella like structures moving away from the dense central one as the flower head matures. This might be a different subspecies or cultivar to the other wild carrot as the flower is a different shape and lacks the coloured ruby spot at the centre.$ The ragwort that was recently home to a cinnabar caterpillar. The flowers look a bit like slightly untidy yellow petalled daisies with orange centres, except when the buds are just opening when the skinny immature petals stick up instead of out like a tiny crown.

The ragwort that was recently home to a cinnabar caterpillar. The flowers look a bit like slightly untidy yellow petalled daisies with orange centres, except when the buds are just opening when the skinny immature petals stick up instead of out like a tiny crown.

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etc @etchachan.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

The caterpillar is gone, they aren’t on the other two nearby ragworts and they were a bit small to pupate so maybe something ate them, having not learned about their taste yet. I did find an adult on some greater knapweed, so hopefully there will be more caterpillars one day. #moth #insect

An adult cinnabar moth, clinging to the underside of a greater knapweed leaf. They fold their wings up quite closely, so the black body is largely hidden behind the slim black triangular wing, showing the only head and legs. A thick red stripes marks the leading edge of the wings and two red blobs mark the inner and outer corners of the trailing edge.

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etc @etchachan.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

Here’s one I don’t recall seeing before… sainfoin, apparently. I wondered if it were a vetch of some kind, and its scientific name is Onobrychis viciifolia, the latter meaning “vetch leaved”. #bloomscrolling #wildflowers

The flower head of a common sainfoin. There are many flowers on the head, each a surprisingly bright pink with deeper pink veins. The shape reminds me of a square-rigged boat, with a curved vertical petal for the sail, and another as pointed hull jutting out beneath it.

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etc @etchachan.bsky.social · 27/06/2026

Today’s “get a better camera!” moment is this pair of mating common blue damselflies. The female has andromorphic colouring… she’s blue like a male, but keeps the female style of black areas on the top of her abdomen. My iphone doesn’t do a good job of making that clear, though. #insect #damselfly

A pair of making common blue damsel flies. The male is perched on the gone-over flower head of plantain, and is holding the female by the neck using the claspers on the tip of his long abdomen. The female has her abdomen arched up underneath her, and is ticking the top of it to the end of his thorax to receive some sperm.

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etc @etchachan.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

Well, no-mow-may segued into didn’t-want-to-mow-june, on account of how nice the oxeye daisies sprouting in the lawn looked. So now we have some new free flowers growing next to them. More details in the alt text. #bloomscrolling #wildflowers

Lesser knapweed. We have big boring bushes of greater knapweed elsewhere, but the lesser stuff looks much prettier, and is much less spready.

The leaves are long and thin and the flower is thistle like… a puffball of long and slender tubelike individual flowers which are white at the base tending through pale purple to dark purple at the tip.

Red clover, which isn’t red at all. The small leaves have pointed oval shapes, and a pale green arrowhead mark in the centre pointing away from the stem. The flowers have the classic fabaceae shape of you look closely, but they form a puffball of many small flowers together so it isn’t obvious at first glance. Despite the name, the flowers are white at the base and pink at the tips, darkening to purple as they go over and wither away.

Yarrow. It forms many tiny white flowers with creamy orange centres which form little umbrella-shapes which meet up with other flowers that can form a sort of bumpy sheet-like structure, like an untidy umbellifer.

It can sometimes form pale pink flowers which I rather like, but this is uncommon and I’ve never seen it in our garden.

A musk mallow, either suffering from the heat or going over… the top of the plant has bowed over and the flower that was horizontal yesterday is now pointing at the ground. It has five pale pink petals with fain darker pink veins running down their length, with tip that are split into a v-shape.

The central structures have an interesting barbed and hairy structure, but I picked the wrong camera to get a good look at it.

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etc @etchachan.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

This is nice… we have some ragwort that’s not far off flowering, and a little cinnabar moth caterpillar! Ragwort tends to get exterminated by horse owners and cattle farmers, and the moths that feed on it are in decline. #wildflower #moth

A dense cluster of yellow ragwort flower buds, still closed, atop a few frilly green leaves. Crawling over the buds is a young cinnabar moth caterpillar, less than 2cm long. Its body has thin alternating black and orange stripes, and a few fine white hairs protrude from either end of the body. The head is on the left, only distinguishable by being a slightly more black than the tail end.

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etc @etchachan.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

An invasive box moth. I’ve never seen an adult before, though I’ve seen the damage that the larvae can do to box trees. We had some quite mature box bushes here when we moved in, but they were skeletal wrecks in just a couple of years and can’t recover. #insect #moth #invasivespecies

An adult box moth, resting on some white painted wood, wings open and flat against the surface forminga sort of diamond silhouette. The head, tip of its tail and a thick outline around the wings are all black, whereas the body and the middle of the wings are as silvery white.

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etc @etchachan.bsky.social · 23/06/2026

I saw this water fountain when it was at the eden project, but it wasn’t working 🙁 Modelled after the sculptor’s wife, apparently. www.lissongallery.com/artists/ryan...

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etc @etchachan.bsky.social · 21/06/2026

Everyone knows that boobplate armour is a silly idea, but I don’t know if anyone has spoken about egregiously form-fitting buttmail, such as on this painting of a genoese crossbowman at the battle of crecy. #medieval #butt #armour

A genoese crossbowman, cropped from a painting of the battle of crecy, from a 15th-century illuminated manuscript of Jean Froissart's Chronicles

He’s been shot twice with arrows as he flees the battle , once on the right thought and once in the right buttock. He’s wearing some sort of fabric surcoat, possibly padded, but visible below the waist is what looks a lot like the hem of a mail hauberk. It is flush against the skin, and the artist has made it very clear how closely it wraps around the crossbowman’s behind, separating and underlining the glutes. His legs may be covered by tightly fitting buff-coloured leggings, or he may just be bare to the ankles like he’s in iron hot pants.

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etc @etchachan.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

Holding pattern of hover flies coming in for breakfast on a poppy. #poppy #insect #hoverfly

A small and slightly battered red poppy with the small hoverflies. One has landed and is feeding, one is perhaps taking off and heading away left, and one is just coming in to land from the right.

The right most one is silhouetted against a piece of out-of-focus white building waste showing its black, yellow and white striped abdomen relatively clearly.

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etc @etchachan.bsky.social · 17/06/2026

Marbled white butterfly spotted on a short walk. There were so many butterflies out and about, it was a delight to see. Most weren’t so willing to be photographed, though. #butterfly #insect

A marbled white butterfly, perched on a stalk of grass, wings closed, against an out-of-focus background of clover. The underside of the wings has a pale off-white colour with dark veins and small dusty brown patches with angular black outlines.

The same marbled white, this time wings open to show the black upper wing surface with a symmetric pattern of late white blotches. The body is a furry grey.

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etc @etchachan.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

Crabronid wasp. That chunky-looking head holds plenty bf muscle for operating the big jaws, which it uses to tunnel into wood. We used to see more of them before we get rid of or old rotting wooden conservatory. #wasp #insect #crabronidae

A medium-sized wasp on the corner of a folded wad of paper, on top of a metal mesh. It is facing towards the camera, showing its funky head and large black compound eyes and its large yellow jaws. There are three small simple eyes on the top of its black head, arranged in a triangle pattern.

The same wasp seen side on, standing in the yellow cluster of florets at the centre of an oxeye daisy, possibly having a snack. Other than it’s squarish head and seemingly huge eyes (i think they’re normal sized but black eyes on a large black head look larger) it is like a regular wasp, with a thing waist, black and yellow striped abdomen, etc. it’s legs are yellow at the end and black at the top.

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etc @etchachan.bsky.social · 12/06/2026

Scarlet tiger moth. They’re quite similar in shape and behaviour to the jersey tiger moths we see more often here, but they’re a lot more brightly coloured and eyecatching when they’re in flight. #moth #insect

A scarlet tiger moth perching on a leaf of some ivy that’s clinging to a wooden fence. The moth’s wings are mostly folded forming a triangular shape with the head at one point. The forewings are a glossy black with symmetrical cream-coloured splotches, and the hind wings, of which only a thin wedge is visible at the back, are a vivid red colour with black splotches.

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etc @etchachan.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

Harlequin ladybird and two late-instar larvae on the end of a small buddleia. The plant was covered with blackfly and many ladybirds feeding on them… this one little sprig had three adults and eight larvae over if which was starting to pupate. #insects #ladybird

The end of a branch of buddleia, pigtailed against the afternoon sun rendering the background overexposed white. The leaves are a bit wrinkled and covered in blackfly. There are two large ladybird larvae next to each other feeding on them, and one large adult harlequin ladybird a little further along the leaf.

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etc @etchachan.bsky.social · 08/06/2026

Another one from last month when I didn’t have my nice camera. I think this is female large red damselfly showing the “melanotum” colouration where the abdomen is much more black than red. #damselfly

A dark reddish coloured damselfly sitting on as patch of whitish lichen on a rock. The very dark abdomen suggests the “melanotum” colouration variant, which is only shown by females. The legs are black, distinguishing it from the small red damselfly species.

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etc @etchachan.bsky.social · 07/06/2026

First of the summer fruit! Raspberries and dwarf mulberries. The mulberry suffered a bit from the weather last year and dropped most of its fruit, but it’s looking much better now. #garden #fruit

A round blue and white bowl full of soft fruit, red raspberries and black mulberries, on a black granite counter top.

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etc @etchachan.bsky.social · 06/06/2026

Our ones flowered last week when we were away, and so we only saw the buds and now seed pods. The sweet peas in the background are doing well, though.

A cluster of six green opium poppy seed heads, with little yellow crown-like structures which will eventually form the sort of shakers that will distribute the seeds in a breeze. In the background are out-of-focus pink sweet pea flowers on a large bush.

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etc @etchachan.bsky.social · 06/06/2026

This is what they’re supposed to look like. The one has a bonus bumblebee on final approach, but there’s no way the bee would be able to navigate those other flowers, even assuming they can produce pollen or nectar. #bumblebee #poppies

A normal opium poppy seen from the front, with flour slightly overlapping bright pink petals with dark patches at their bases forming across pattern. Inside that is a ring of pale fluffy stamens, and at the centre is the greenish yellow eight-segmented bit that will form the seed pod when the flower is fertilised.

There’s a bumblebee just approaching this one and extending its legs which are slightly dusted with pollen from another flower.

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