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 cute little Black-and-white Warbler can often be found hanging upside down or on the sides of tree trunks and large branches as it probes into bark crevices, much as a Brown Creeper does. The amount of climatically suitable space for it seems to be relatively stable, but a rather large northward shift is projected for both the possible summer and winter ranges and Audubon's climate model predicts only 17% of the current summer range will remain stable. This is a bird of forested lands, though, so any expansion onto what is currently Arctic tundra will be slowed by however long it takes for forests to become established there. Most Black-and-white Warblers winter in Middle America.
Explore more birds threatened by climate change around the country.
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