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.
Male and female birds cannot appear more different than in the case of the King Eider. The males are boldly patterned in black and white, with red and orange bills and airbrushed green and blue head feathers. Females are a perfectly camouflaged brown—important when trying to evade predators like Arctic foxes while sitting on a nest on the tundra. Audubon's climate model projects a 92 percent loss of current winter range by 2080. Many King Eiders winter mostly at sea, along cold, northern coastlines, so changes to oceans as a result of climate change will have a strong impact on the species. The summer range is not covered by the model, as data from the Arctic tundra are scarce.
Explore more birds threatened by climate change around the country.
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