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.
All the Empidonax flycatchers are hard to identify, but the Cordilleran and Pacific-slope species are particularly challenging. They are ordinarily impossible to distinguish in the field except by voice. The two are ecologically quite similar, as well, but separated by range: Cordilleran in the Intermountain West, Pacific-slope farther west. Suitable climate space for breeders is forecast by Audubon's climate model to decline by roughly two-thirds overall, and only 15 percent of the current range in climatically favorable condition is expected to remain that way by century’s end. Like so many other forest birds in the Interior West, the Cordilleran Flycatcher is likely to face summer range disruptions in a changing climate.
Explore more birds threatened by climate change around the country.
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