Traveling wildlife photographer Heather Nicole’s passion for conservation drives her work. Clad in dragonfly earrings, an elephant ring and a necklace strung with a bear-print charm, Nicole sat down with me to discuss her practice ahead of her newest adventure: a nine-day photography excursion into the Arctic.
“I’m gonna need a polar bear tattoo now,” she joked, pointing out the ravens and dog prints—from her own dogs, rescues named Charles and Abigail—she already carries on her arms. “Like an actual-size polar-bear paw print across my whole back.”
Nicole and her husband were originally slated to visit the Arctic in the spring of 2025, but when the tour’s organizers offered them the chance to make the trip this year instead, they decided the opportunity was worth the short notice and the rush. The excursion, led by Stockholm-based photographer Melissa Schäfer and producer Fredrik Granath, is conservation-driven and aims to be as low-impact on the regions explored as possible.
“You can’t have this opportunity and wait another year. With the polar bears—honestly, who knows how much longer we’re going to have polar bears in the Arctic?” Nicole said.
Originally from Florida’s Gulf Coast, Nicole relocated to Reno-Tahoe in 2019 after taking a seasonal job at Heavenly Ski Resort. Photography has been her passion since she started working with film in high school in the late ’90s, and she learned her way through the transition to digital in the early 2000s. A trip to Tanzania in 2016 cemented her love for wildlife photography, and since then, she has photographed animals and environments in places like Alaska, Costa Rica and India.
“At some point, I just had to get out of Florida,” said Nicole. “(There was) the craziness of Florida … but a lot of it was the humidity. I have multiple sclerosis, so the heat is very hard on me. It got to the point where I could only be outside maybe two months out of the year.”
Nicole is not alone in her relocation. I, myself, am originally from California, and last summer, the Reno Gazette-Journal reported that Nevada boasts the Western United States’ highest move-in ratio. Of new residents relocating to the state, former Californians take first place, while former Floridians take third.
Many people come to Nevada in search of more affordable housing or refuge from the effects of climate change. But as we try to cope with our own habitat issues, we drive other species out of theirs. As Nicole pointed out, Reno was named the fastest warming city in the U.S. by the Climate Center; the federal government aims to mitigate this through grants for increased tree cover, a strategy used to counteract the heat collected by concrete and asphalt surfaces.
Even in the short time Nicole has lived in the region, she has observed the rapid transformation of the natural landscape. “I used to hear coyotes every night, and you just don’t hear them anymore,” she said, speaking of the wildlands near her home in Lemmon Valley that have disappeared beneath new housing developments. “The same with the rabbits—yesterday, I saw a rabbit when I went to check the mail and realized I hadn’t seen a little bunny in maybe two years.”
Nicole hopes that her practice can help encourage conservation by putting critters seen increasingly less often back in sight and back in mind.
“You can tell stories in so many different ways,” she said. “I’m more drawn to photography, because you can say so much with an image, and you can also say so much with what’s not in an image. Now there are houses where there used to be land.”
Nicole plans to develop more written storytelling content to accompany her photographic work. She is also working to incorporate satellite imagery of the Northern Nevada landscape from decades past to throw into relief drastic changes that are easy to miss when observed day by day.
But these projects are on temporary hold as the photographer and her husband cram what they thought would be a year of preparation into a few weeks for their trip to the Arctic. Besides the polar bear’s precarity, Nicole has good reasons to do today what could be put off for tomorrow.
“The way I’m afflicted with MS, it affects everything. That’s one of the other driving forces for me for traveling and wildlife photography,” Nicole said, adding that she makes the most of out-of-town doctor’s appointments by taking scenic detours with her husband along the way. “I have good days and bad. Sometimes it affects my vision. It affects my mobility. My uncle has it, and he can’t walk unassisted. He’s not that old. I see that, and it just scares the hell out of me. So I have to get out and travel while I still can.”
Unlike many of us, Nicole does not have the luxury of forgetting that an uncertain outlook is the reality for all of us—so she works to help us remember that even if we’re just apes, we have opposable thumbs we need to put to work now.
This article was originally published by Double Scoop, Nevada’s source for visual arts news.