Among the likely and much-reported examples of how these shifts might play out: a Minnesota without loons, a Baltimore without orioles. – USFWS photo by Gary J. Wege

“This has been a bad-news week for American birders; also for non-birders who grasp that broad threats to our planet’s feathered species must also imperil the health of all the others.

“The first of two discouraging reports came from the National Audubon Society. It has been widely reported as predicting that as a consequence of habitat shifts driven by climate change, half of North American bird species are likely to be homeless within this century.

“Actually, that would be an optimistic reading of the main findings in “Birds and Climate Change,” a rigorous seven-year effort to overlay climate predictions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on the remarkable data sets generated by a decades of citizen bird counts.

“Because of Audubon’s Christmas Bird Count, begun in 1900, and the North American Breeding Bird Survey begun with U.S. and Canadian government sponsorship in 1966, we know a lot more about birds — their numbers, habitat needs, natural ranges, migration patterns — than most other animals.”

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