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etchachan.bsky.social
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@etchachan.bsky.social
59 followers 79 following 350 posts
Like the loch. Formerly https://cohost.org/etc . I don't know how much I'll actually be using this. They/them.

Slowly constructing a site at https://zawn.dev/ where longer posts will hopefully end up.
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etchachan.bsky.social
Wasp! I suspect this is a boy wasp, though I wasn’t prepared to pick it up to check. Long curved antennae and 7-segment abdomen are the signs here. He was tried and struggling to fly, and probably won’t live much longer.

#insect #wasp
A front-on portrait of a wasp with yellow legs and largely yellow face. Its black antennae have a little patch of yellow at the base. A top down view of a wasp on a greying wooden table top. The wasp has the classic yellow and black colouration, with yellow legs. The black antennae are long and slightly curved at the end, and the abdomen has seven yellow segments with black dividing lines.
November 7, 2025 at 12:57 PM
etchachan.bsky.social
Visiting damp places.
A view of some unidentified greenish lichen growing thickly on a decaying log. The focus is close, and in the blurry background is a dark hole into the log. The time-worn remains of a manufacturer’s logo on a cast iron water pump. A heraldic-looking lion rampant stands on three lines on text in a vaguely anvil-shaped border. The text reads “Lion”, Evans, but the third line is indecipherable. The iron body of the pump is a licheny dusty green over aged iron patina lit by dappled late afternoon light through tree leaves. A cluster of small dark-brown and cream-fringed fungus brackets on a decaying log covered in thick green moss.
November 4, 2025 at 9:57 PM
etchachan.bsky.social
Burd.

Adult european herring #gull. The speckled feathers around the neck and back of the head are a sign of winter plumage, apparently.
A large seabird standing on a wall against a mostly blue sky with patches of grey cloud. The bird has a pale yellow beak with a faint red spot on the lower bill near the tip, white head and breast, and its furled wings are a pale grey with black tips. Its pale yellow eyes are regarding the photographer cautiously. In the bottom right is a sort of faux-castle-like structure… one end of Conwy railway bridge, designed to look a little like Conwy castle from where the photo was taken.
October 28, 2025 at 7:00 PM
etchachan.bsky.social
This is an absolute waste of silicon. It isn’t even a good summary of the regular search results, which despite being dealt a series of probably mortal blows by google, can still show that both terms are linked in the context of social media client software.
A screenshot of the top of a google “search” “results” page. ❇️Al Overview A croissant is a buttery, flaky pastry, while OpenViBE is a software platform for designing and using brain-computer interfaces. They are completely different things: one is a food item, and the other is a computer program for processing brain signals in real-time.
October 15, 2025 at 5:29 PM
etchachan.bsky.social
This graveyard is always a good place for fungi, probably because of the vegetation rather than the residents, but who knows?

#fungi #fungiFriends #mushroomsky
A cluster of small mature toadstools sticking out of grass, with caps darkening and peeling up as they shed spores. A cluster of small brown toadstools with mostly closed cups, growing up from some grass. In the background are a number of blurred grey gravestones against distant dark trees. A single white toadstool growing out of some grass. There’s a sort of scuff mark on the upper surface, probably caused by something small nibbling on it. Blurry trees and a grey building are just visible against a grey sky in the background.
October 15, 2025 at 5:20 PM
etchachan.bsky.social
Dew on the asters this morning

#bloomScrolling
A single blue aster flower. The thing petals are a delicate violet sort of colour, and are speckled with tiny dew drops. They radiate from a reddish centre point, from which protrude a cluster of little florets with orange-brown stalks (the anthers) and topped with yellow stigmas each of which hold their own tiny drop of dew.
October 14, 2025 at 11:29 AM
etchachan.bsky.social
Ripe magnolia fruit.
A cluster of ripe magnolia fruit, fallen from a tree onto a paving slab. The fleshy parts of the fruit are pink and purple and peeling away from the glossy bright orange seed in the centre, which looks a little like a sugar-coated sweet.
October 9, 2025 at 4:31 PM
etchachan.bsky.social
#Hornet snuggling. There were a dozen or so flying around a low tree branch and a group of three on a leaf fell off and hit the ground, and the others joined in. I didn’t want to investigate closer, though.

#insects
A dense cluster of at least seven hornets, with yellow and black striped abdomens and orangey thoraxes. They’re on the ground and climbing over or grappling with one another.
October 8, 2025 at 9:46 AM
etchachan.bsky.social
Stripey crocus! It looks quite a lot like a saffron crocus (Crocus sativa) but it is growing in a bit of a shady spot, and saffron crocus likes sunshine. The stigmas look bushier than I’d expect of saffron, too. I might go back tomorrow, and take some more photos.

#bloomScrolling
A crocus flower growing out of a layer of brown, dried leaves. The flower has a very pale blue colour, with strong royal blue or indigo veins, the 3 to 5 strong veins running lengthways along the petals from base towards the tip, and a large number of thinner veins running diagonally from the centre. In the middle of the flower are three short pale orange stamens, and several much longer bright orange stigmas, which have a strange forked and branching appearance.
September 29, 2025 at 4:09 PM
etchachan.bsky.social
I’ve been past this fountain quite a few times, and thought that the laminar flow effect was neat, but nothing amazing. Turns out when there’s a breeze it looks much more interesting, especially in freeze-frame.

#laminarFlow #fountain
A photograph of a fountain that bounces a laminar jet of water off a surged surface to produce a sort of smooth bell of water. A gust of wind has disrupted the bell and it looks almost as it if has torn or popped, with the sheet of water billowing and distintegarting into droplets at the edges.
September 19, 2025 at 8:14 PM
etchachan.bsky.social
The upside of living in a well-built modern house is that it is very economical to heat, and easy to keep warm. The downside to that is the very lack of ventilation that keeps the heat in means the CO2 can’t go out.

Away for the weekend, and back to cold weather, closed windows and degraded sleep 😕
A graph of CO2 levels in parts per million, taken in my bedroom over the past week. Pre-weekend, peak levels were about 1300ppm overnight, but post weekend they’ve been exceeding 2000ppm.
September 16, 2025 at 7:51 PM
etchachan.bsky.social
Geology turns out to be an important thing for memorials. I grew up in granite country, and that stuff is hard and expensive to work. This gravestone is from sedimentary country, and whilst the engraving was easier and the text started out sharp and clear, it’s days of legibility are numbered.
A shot of a gravestone, taken at an angle. Layers of gritty material are flaking off the face of the stone, and whilst the engraved text is deep it is becoming harder to read the more the surface is eroded. One thin layer has partially separated, and space can be seen underneath the letters which now look more like stencils. The text is incomplete, and wouldn’t be wholly visible in the frame anyway, but the visible portions say: Of Siss… Frenc… Died 20… Age William Died Presumably at least two people from the same family were buried here.
September 15, 2025 at 8:15 PM
etchachan.bsky.social
Wildlife in a neighbour’s garden. We’re not in a particularly urban space, but it still surprises me when I see muntjac trotting around like this.
A male muntjac deer with short antlers by the blue front door of a brick-walled house.
September 12, 2025 at 9:26 AM
etchachan.bsky.social
A wasp, wondering if a crumb of cheese from my lunch is good to eat. It wasn’t impressed.

#wasp #insects
A common wasp (vespula vulgaris) on a grey and faintly reflective ceramic plate. It is chewing up a tiny crumb of cheese. The crust of a sandwich makes up the right hand edge of the image.
September 11, 2025 at 5:09 PM
etchachan.bsky.social
Thought it might be nice to go see the eclipse, but as is so common with uk astronomy, if I’m willing and able to go see it, there will be cloud, and I could see nothing. The front blowing over did look nice in the sunset, though.
Clouds at the trailing edge of a cloudfront, a little after the sun has already disappeared over the hills. The sky to the left of the frame is blue, and a spread of fluffy lower level clouds fades from pinkish in the middle to grey at the right. A higher altitude blanket of cloud is visible across the bottom of the frame, still yellow as the sun is only just setting from their viewpoint. A dusty, stubbly field forms the lower border of the image.
September 7, 2025 at 7:39 PM
etchachan.bsky.social
The contrast between the state of the disintegrating roof aspect and its neighbours is weird.

I remain unable to work out how to photograph buildings.

#urbandecay
Some old, steep rooflines with small, dark slates against a backdrop of light-walled, dark-roofed buildings, mature trees and a wide-ish river. One face of the roof in the middle of the photograph is disintegrating, with many slates sliding out of place in an increasingly chaotic mosaic. No large holes have formed, but creeping shrubs are emerging from several places. Adjacent roofs, even of the same building, are in much better condition.
September 6, 2025 at 8:51 PM
etchachan.bsky.social
Free flowers! Self-seeded cyclamen (probably hederifolium) sprouting up through a gravelled path in our garden.

#bloomscrolling
A cluster of cyclamen flowers and seed heads poking up from a path of small brownish chert chips. The flower heads point towards the ground, with the five petals swept up behind them, pointing towards the sky. Each petal has a purple base, and fades tin white at the tip.
September 6, 2025 at 10:04 AM
etchachan.bsky.social
With sufficient experience in foraging, with good knowledge of local flow and seasonal patterns, you can get a good idea of where to find the best mushrooms.
Two bright red signs with white text, nailed to the trunk of a tree, against a backdrop of thick woodland. They say, in French, “no entry” and “collecting of mushrooms forbidden”.
August 27, 2025 at 3:23 PM
etchachan.bsky.social
Things my iphone refuses to take pictures of, part 94: mantises. Took a dozen pictures of each of these in different modes and zooms and positions, couldn’t get the damn thing to focus on the head at all. It just likes grass too much.
A blurry green praying mantis against a background of grass that’s very clear and sharply in focus. A blurry brown praying mantis, regarding the photographer, against a background of well-focussed grass.
August 26, 2025 at 7:12 AM
etchachan.bsky.social
Me, sowing: yeah, you should totally by the cheap, undevelopable plot of land by your house. It’s got a few mature walnut trees on it, it’ll be nice.

Me, reaping: shelling 4 sacks of walnuts takes fucking forever, and the field is too steep for ride-on mowers, so we need monstrous push-mower 🥵
A large and heavy and powerful lawnmower, designed to be operated by someone walking behind. It has two chunky wheels that are powered to help move it along, and a metal weight at the front to make it less inclined to tipping. A field that took me two hours to mow. It extends as far as the barn in the distance, and the hedge at the bottom of the hill, and long shadows stretch across it cast by trees out of the right edge of the frame. A large, mature common walnut tree is roughly in the middle at the top of the frame, and the sky is a clear blue.
August 25, 2025 at 10:36 AM
etchachan.bsky.social
3 minutes before the rain hit me. Playing with panorama mode. Turns out that not only can I not follow the guide arrow, but also the iphone camera magic won’t straighten horizons for me. Waves hide pano artefacts though, which is nice.
A photograph of a cloudy sea-scape, with a line of rocks down the left and a broad sandy beach on the right. The clouds are thick and grey and visibly producing sheets of heavy rain on the horizon, and the sea beneath is a dark green. Waves are breaking on the beach in lines of white foam, and in the distance some surfers are just faintly visible.
August 23, 2025 at 4:13 PM
etchachan.bsky.social
Some thirsty #hornets engaging in a bit of #trophallaxis during the very hot weather last week. I initially thought they were fighting, and they were at it for about 10 minutes before flying off. Apologies for the terrible camera work.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophal...

#insects #thisTooIsYuri
August 21, 2025 at 7:25 PM
etchachan.bsky.social
Scolia hirta wasp on some Vitex agnus-castus flowers. Bad phone photo, but it was a very large and striking looking wasp (I thought it might be a weird hornet) and it seemed worth looking up. They’re parasitic on beetle larvae, but aren’t aggressive towards humans at all.
A large black wasp, with very dark wings with shiny blue highlights, and two thick bright yellow bands on its abdomen. It is feeding from some pale blue flowers on some sort of Vitex shrub. Long thin pale green leaves can be seen in the background which look similar to sage.
August 21, 2025 at 9:29 AM
etchachan.bsky.social
I also found this weird thing just below the summit of Glyder Fach. It’s a smooth river stone that someone painted and carted up here… not a massive hike, but not a 5 minute wander. I wonder why it was here. The reverse side was unpainted.
A smooth oval pebble, cracked lengthwise and painted pink. On one half is written LOLA in white capitals, with a black circle beneath. On the other half is a p-of-view sketch, showing what is probably a pair of boobs and a penis at least partially covered with clothing.
July 31, 2025 at 8:43 PM
etchachan.bsky.social
A hike over Glyder Fach and Glyde Fawr via bwlch Tryfan and the devil’s kitchen. The forecast implied the clouds would lift, but most of the trip was murky enough to make my attempts at photography a bit pointless.
Llyn Bochlwyd, at 550m where I met the cloud base, here seemingly only a few metres over the lakes surface and completely concealing the surrounding mountain rock faces. A brief window of blue sky in the cloud over Glyder Fach shows the glacial valley of Nant Ffrancon and the A5 far below, and the mounds of shattered rock in the foreground that make up the hill’s summit plateau. Cladonia cristatella, apparently also known as british soldier lichen, is a lichen with vivid red spore bearing structures that make it easy to spot and identify. This clump was found in the shelter of one of the massive boulders that make up the true summit of Glyder Fach. Devil’s kitchen on the way down, with the cliff top and hills above hidden in thick cloud by the vertical cliffs flanking it and the vegetation covered remains of old rockfalls visible in the gloom below it.
July 31, 2025 at 8:38 PM