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 insects you hear in a marsh in north-central North America may not all be insects. The song of the Le Conte’s Sparrow is distinctly non-musical and harsh, resembling something more like a grasshopper than what most think of as birdsong. Continuing a trend in recent decades, the species is projected to shift its wintering range north considerably, mostly in the form of potential new climate-space becoming available. But that won’t matter if the model’s catastrophic predictions of the summer situation are correct: an almost complete (99 percent) loss of current range by 2080. Marsh grass grows quickly, so this migratory species may be able to adapt.
Explore more birds threatened by climate change around the country.
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