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.
The smart-looking Black-chinned Sparrow prefers dense scrub on rather steep hillsides, making it difficult to find for many birders. Often the best clue to its presence is the male’s impressive “bouncing ping pong ball” song. Troublingly, Audubon’s climate model projects a complete shift in current summer range. The Black-chinned Sparrow is mostly a short-distance migrant in the U.S., so perhaps it will be able to adapt to this predicted change in summer range. The forecast shows winter range to be mostly stable and potentially increasing, but most Black-chins winter in Mexico and, thus, were not sampled.
Explore more birds threatened by climate change around the country.
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