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 western woodpecker ranges widely in mountain forests, especially those with an aspen-conifer mix. Although locally common, Williamson’s Sapsuckers are scarce in large areas of seemingly suitable habitat. In Canada, at the periphery of the range, the species is endangered. Logging is the chief cause of this sapsucker’s precarious situation in Canada. Audubon's climate model results do not bode well for this sapsucker: a 90 percent loss of current winter range and a 99 percent loss of current summer range by 2080. On the breeding grounds in particular, aggressive protection and, in some areas, creative management of mixed hardwood–conifer forests may be increasingly required.
Explore more birds threatened by climate change around the country.
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