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 King Rail is the freshwater cousin of the saltwater-loving Clapper Rail. King Rails are at home anywhere there is a large cattail marsh. The biggest existing threat to King Rails is probably the draining of marshes across its breeding range, which extends across much of the eastern U.S. and barely into Ontario. Adding to this threat, Audubon's climate model projects an 87 percent loss of current winter range by 2080, dispersing suitable wintering climate space across the interior of the eastern US. While birds in the U.S. may be forced northward, it remains to be seen how birds currently wintering throughout coastal Mexico and Cuba, outside of the model's analysis, may respond.
Explore more birds threatened by climate change around the country.
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