Bellskimmer Studio started as a research project and has morphed into a naturalist-inspired adventure that bounces between art and science with effortless merriment. My work uses the tools of photography, poetry, and storytelling to make the unnoticed corners of the natural world more accessible to people. In 2020 I stared looking for dragonflies and in 2022 I saw my own reflection in a june beetle. That connection inspired the body of work titled The Hidden Realm, which pulled from my roots of poetry and music as it grew to multiple sections woven with musical themes. The journey into the hidden realm, using the scaffolding of naturalist observation, has been the grandest adventure of my life.


What is a Bellskimmer, anyway?

It is a play on words. A Twelve-spotted Skimmer is a dragonfly in the family Libellulidae, common name Skimmer.


A telescope, a microscope, and a macro lens to see all the realms, yet so much remains

unnoticed. All conservation efforts start with awareness.

All content on this page was created by Nicole Birch, DBA Bellskimmer Studio. Photoshop AI tools were used in the editing of photographs and the graphic design of compositions. Insects were not posed, but shot with a camera while going about their insect lives. The decision to not manipulate their activities was fundamental to style and mission.

Nicole the Artist

Nicole the Naturalist

Field notebooks
iNaturalist
Dragonfly variation

Current Exhibitions

"There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved."

— Charles Darwin, closing to origin of species.