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 gull is a conundrum. It is difficult to identify, prone to vagrancy and hybridization, and maybe not even a full species. Currently the Thayer’s Gull winters mainly along the West Coast, but with small numbers eastward to the Great Plains and even the western Great Lakes. Audubon's climate model projects a 55 percent loss of current winter range by 2080, with potential for a substantial range shift. In particular, the upper Midwest may soon host considerably more Thayer’s Gulls in winter than is currently the case. The model does not look at climate during the summer on the high-latitude breeding grounds—relatively modest in extent and likely to be affected by climate change.
Explore more birds threatened by climate change around the country.
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