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.
Diminutive and obscurely marked, the Least Flycatcher sits quietly in the leafy foliage of northern hardwood forests across the northern U.S. and southern Canada. Audubon's climate model projects a 60 percent loss of current summer range. By century’s end, this bird’s range may have shifted considerably north of where it currently lies, as suitable climate space in the summer is forecast by the model to spread all the way to the Arctic Coastal Plain. Expansion of the summer range will likely be limited by the spread northward of hardwood forests. In winter, the southeastern coastal plain of the U.S. may become available to the bird, a habitat generalist in the non-breeding season.
Explore more birds threatened by climate change around the country.
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