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.
There are desert birds and then there are desert birds. This one is an extreme, favoring the hottest, driest, and lowest deserts in the U.S. Nowhere is the Le Conte’s Thrasher particularly common, but it reaches its greatest densities in sparsely vegetated desert with saltbush and not much else. In other words, the species currently occupies the sort of environment that, unfortunately, may occur much more extensively in a changing climate. Accordingly, the model shows large potential expansion of suitable climate space in both summer and winter. However, Audubon's model projects a 79 percent loss of current winter range, resulting in a decoupling of summer and winter climate spaces, an event that may likely rein in the spread of this non-migratory species.
Explore more birds threatened by climate change around the country.
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