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 gorgeous, ethereal, spiraling songs of Sprague’s Pipits fill the air of the high plains during June and July. Literally. The birds deliver their songs from hundreds of feet in the air. But if Audubon's climate model projections are correct, those songs may be silenced before the end of the century. The model projects a 100 percent loss of current summer range by 2080, paired with a complete loss of all climatically suitable summer range in the future. The winter range is projected to shift completely and shrink by half, but that may be a faulty assumption, since most Sprague’s Pipits currently winter in Mexico and are not factored into the model’s projections. None of that will matter if there is no breeding habitat left in the summer.
Explore more birds threatened by climate change around the country.
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