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 male of this species has a nearly invisible, iridescent maroon ring around its neck. All sexes and ages, however, have a bold white ring around the blue bill, making “Ring-billed Duck” a much better name. Ring-necked Ducks nest both in marshes and lakes in boreal forest. A projected major upheaval of climate in areas now covered by the latter may be responsible for the predicted 92 percent shift in summer range by 2080, as predicted by Audubon's climate model. The species’ winter range, however, looks remarkably stable, with variance of less than 10 percent in both range and available area, but potential major issues loom in the future in the summer season.
Explore more birds threatened by climate change around the country.
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