Permanent Tourist

The personal website of Mark Howells-Mead

Posts about nature

  • Swallows on a telephone wire

    Last of the swallows

    Last of the swallows for this year, I suspect. I haven’t seen them around much this year at home, but there were dozens out yesterday, feeding their young before their long journey. (We have a perfectly-positioned telephone wire near our balcony, so it’s a great spot to watch and to photograph them.)

  • Until I moved to Switzerland, my interest in photography was mainly confined to recording what I was up to; from time with friends and family, to documentary photography on the streets of London and capturing scenes when I was on holiday. I had begun getting interested in landscape photography after a few visits to the…

  • The Branch at Weissenau

    If you find a natural feature, enjoy it while it lasts.

  • The Petite Camargue Alsacienne is a French nature reserve along the Rhine, just north of the border with Switzerland. It was founded in 1982 as a protected habitat by the French government and is named for the huge nature reserve seven hundred kilometres away, on the shores of the Mediterranean. We visited a couple of…

  • Our regular swallow visitors have a preferred perch above the area around our house. And it’s just a few metres from our balcony.

  • Gwatt nature reserve, Thun

    I just came across a short film I made in January and posted to YouTube at the time. Filmed with my X100 and edited quickly in iMovie, it shows the publicly accessible lake-shore nature reserve at Gwatt, some fifteen minutes’ drive from home.

  • A gathering of Edelweiss on the Flower Path at Mürren.

  • Lovely to return from our holiday to find that the rose plant which I bought in spring has been lapping up the combination of rain and heat whilst we were away, to present us with 6 blooms on our arrival home.

  • Seeing wild flamingoes for the first time, in the south of France.

  • Wild red stags

    Driving back from Tongue, on the far north coast of Scotland, our journey through part of the most remote areas of the Highlands coincided with dusk. Wild deer come down from the hills at this time of night to make their way to the water of the lochs.

  • OK, OK, I know: I’m a city boy at heart. But I defy anyone to be less than impressed when rounding a corner on a lonely road in the Scottish Highlands at dusk to be confronted with a hillside covered in wild red deer.

  • The Rosengarten (Rose Garden) in Bern is high on the hill to the east of the city, with fantastic views across the Aare meander and the lower part of the old city.

  • Pink Cones

    Pink pine cones amongst a mass of natural colour on the trees outside our window at home.

  • Jo’s parents found baby hedgehogs in their garden for three Fridays in a row during September this year. The animals were late babies – too small to survive the winter – so Jo’s father Roy drove the 20-odd miles to take them to the Wormit Hedgehog Care Centre, across the River Tay from Dundee. Jo…