Jaymi Heimbuch

I’ve spent my career at the intersection of wildlife photography and conservation storytelling, and if there's one thing that keeps proving itself true, it's this:

when people fall in love with wild things, they protect them.

That's been the throughline for the better part of two decades. My photography and writing have appeared in National Geographic Books, Audubon Magazine, BBC Wildlife Magazine, Sierra Magazine, National Wildlife Magazine, Bay Nature Magazine, and many more. I wrote a book about Ethiopian wolves teetering on the edge of extinction, and received a National Geographic grant for Urban Coyote Initiative, a six-year project that used photography, storytelling, and science to make urban wildlife coexistence feel less like a radical idea. I've also led photography tours around the world, taught conservation photography workshops, and built courses for visual storytellers who want their work to make a real dent.

These days I lead digital strategy for Ranger Rick magazine at the National Wildlife Federation, with the underlying mission of helping more kids fall in love with the nature around them, which is exactly as joyful as it sounds.

Better With Birds is what happens when this conservation photographer got a little obsessed with the idea that loving birds is genuinely good for people, and that more people loving birds is genuinely good for birds and the planet. I built it because I wanted a place where the photography, the storytelling, and the conservation mission could all live together, and because I believe the best way to protect wild things is to help people fall in love with them first.

That's still why I show up here every day. The conservation piece isn't a marketing angle... it's the whole point. I give 20% of profits to bird conservation and inclusive birding, because the birds deserve a cut.

It's also an outlet for me to expand beyond photography and writing into other areas of art and connection - from embroidery pattern design to surface pattern design, from 3D modeling and printing to things I haven't figured out yet. Birds keep surprising me. I figure the work should too. This is a place to keep uncovering new ways of turning a love of birds into something we can (sustainably, responsibly) hold, wear, or hang on our walls. The medium keeps changing. The purpose doesn't.

So, please dive in... read, shop, enjoy. And thank you for being part of it all.