Each map is a visual guide to where a particular bird species may find the climate conditions it needs to survive in the future. We call this the bird’s “climatic range.”
The colors indicate the season in which the bird may find suitable conditions— blue for winter, yellow for summer (breeding), and green for where they overlap (indicating their presence year-round).
The darker the shaded area, the more likely it is the bird species will find suitable climate conditions to survive there.
The outline of the approximate current range for each season remains fixed in each frame, allowing you to compare how the range will expand, contract, or shift in the future.
The first frame of the animation shows where the bird can find a suitable climate today (based on data from 2000). The next three frames predict where this bird’s suitable climate may shift in the future—one frame each for 2020, 2050, and 2080.
You can play or pause the animation with the orange button in the lower left, or select an individual frame to study by clicking on its year.
By 2080, this grassland bird is expected to lose 100 percent of its current summer range and 22 percent of its winter range, according to Audubon’s climate model. It remains to be seen if the bird possesses the behavioral and genetic plasticity to adapt to the coming changes.
This small, brown-streaked songbird is somewhat nomadic. It is adapted to grassland habitats that have always varied from year to year, owing to the effects of drought, rain, fire, and herds of grazing animals. It forages for insects and seeds among grasses, and nests on the ground, scratching out little hollows in the earth and lining them with grasses, stems, and roots in preparation for its clutch of speckled eggs. A migratory bird, the Baird’s Sparrow winters in north-central Mexico and parts of the southwestern United States, and summers in south-central Canada and the north-central United States. The prairie lands it breeds in are vanishing due to farming, invasive plants, and fire suppression.
Explore more birds threatened by climate change around the country.
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