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 soft chanting of the Common Poorwill is one of the evocative sounds of summer on rocky slopes and arid pinewoods across the American West. Because of the bird’s nocturnal habits, its abundance is greatly underestimated by most standard bird survey protocols. Audubon’s climate model forecasts a significant shift of the summer climate space, leaving only 26% of the current core stable. The core areas today are in the Great Basin and southwestern deserts, and the predicted shift to new haunts in the southern Great Plains may be very challenging for the poorwill to colonize.
Explore more birds threatened by climate change around the country.
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