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 people who’ve been birding for decades and have never laid eyes on a Yellow Rail. This tiny, straw-colored bird found in dense, marshy grasslands and rice fields is seldom detected, especially in the winter when it is silent. Audubon's climate model forecasts a 100 percent loss of current winter range by 2080. Perhaps most important for the survival of this species is preventing the large-scale draining of marshland. That practice caused the extinction of a subspecies of Yellow Rail in central Mexico, which no longer hosts the species at all.
Are the projected range maps different from the range maps in field guides? Find the answer here.
Explore more birds threatened by climate change around the country.
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