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 bruiser of a gull is the northern ecological counterpart of the Western Gull. It breeds coastally from the Bering Sea south to around the Puget Sound, where it comes into contact with—and hybridizes with—the Western Gull. Audubon's climate model forecasts only modest changes in the total amount of climatically favorable space, but large-scale geographic disruptions may be in the offing, as only 20% of the existing summer range remanis stable and new areas of suitable climate space open up in eastern Canada. If Glaucous-winged Gulls establish a toehold so far from their current West Coast haunts (very doubtful), wildlife managers will be closely monitoring their interactions and possible hybridization with other gull species.
Explore more birds threatened by climate change around the country.
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