Scientists have time and again warned of the serious consequences of climate change, and a new study conducted by the National Audubon Society shows that the changing climate could threaten half of North American bird species to extinction.
The researchers have identified 314 bird species of the 588 species that they have studied to be at risk of being wiped out as they could lose over half of their geographic range by the end of this century. In the study described in Audubon's bird and climate change report released on Monday, Sept. 8, Audubon's chief scientist Gary Langham and colleagues used data from Audubon's Christmas Bird Count and the U.S. Geological Survey's North American Breeding Bird Survey as well as climate models from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to determine how bird species in the U.S. and Canada will be affected by warming planet.
"Audubon's findings classify 314 species-nearly half of all North American birds-as severely threatened by global warming," the Audubon website reads.
What the researchers found out reveals a grim future for majority of North American bird species. Langham and colleagues found that the changing climate has the potential to drastically change the population of birds in North America and that about half of approximately 650 species of birds will have to thrive in smaller spaces or look for a new place to live, eat and breed for the next 65 years, or they could face risks of extinction.
The Audubon scientists who prepared the report predicted that more than 21 percent of the bird species they have studied will lose over 50 percent of their current climactic range by 2050 without the possibility to make up losses by moving somewhere else. Another 32 percent of the birds will suffer from the same predicament come 2080.
The birds that will be most impacted include the northern gannet, the three-toed woodpecker, Baird's sparrow, the rufous hummingbird, the northern hawk owl and the trumpeter swan as these are included in the 30 bird species that will no longer be able to live and breed in over 90 percent of their current territory by 2050.
"The notion that we can have a future that looks like what our grandparents experienced, with the birds they had, is unlikely," Langham said.
The bald eagle, a national symbol of the United States, will also be affected by global warming, a phenomenon largely attributed to the advent of the industrial revolution, as it could experience a 75 percent reduction in its habitat by 2080.
