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.
Combining attributes of both jays and crows, the Clark’s Nutcracker is widespread at high elevations in the West. In summer, the species nests near tree line. Some winters, nutcrackers irrupt well into the lowlands; other winters, they stay at fairly high elevations. Suitable climate space is forecast by Audubon’s climate model to decrease by roughly equal amounts—around 70 percent—in both summer and winter, with only 16% of the current summer space remaining stable and 25% of winter space stable by 2080. Tied as this species is to the high western coniferous forests, it seems unlikely it will be able to adapt to any new shifting climate space.
Explore more birds threatened by climate change around the country.
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