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.
This bluebird is just as “western” as the Western Bluebird, but the two species occupy different habitats in summer. The Western is more of a forest bird, the Mountain more partial to open habitats: high sagebrush desert, mountain meadows, and even alpine tundra. Potentially severe loss of current summer range by 2080, as projected by Audubon's climate model, may be most acute at high elevations, where meadows and tundra are widely expected to suffer from climate change. Conversely, suitable climate space is forecast to potentially expand in winter, a result consistent with the Mountain Bluebird’s habitat preferences at that time of year.
Explore more birds threatened by climate change around the country.
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