THE NEW CLIMATE

When Smart Birds Struggle: What Arctic Birds Taught Me About Climate Risk

Why big brains and broad ranges aren’t always enough when the climate starts to shift

Image created by the Author with CANVA. Based on a Wikipedia Commons image by Lisa Hupp/USFWS: Bohemian Waxwing eating a berry, Kenai National Wildlife Refuge, Alaska

A few years ago, I was deep into a macroecological project, analyzing the range maps of hundreds of mammals alongside a team of fellow researchers. Our goal was to understand how a species’ distribution might shape its resilience.

It felt intuitive: if a species has a wide range, it probably copes better with change. If it’s clever (say, it has a big brain) it’s likely more adaptable. That was the hypothesis.

But in practice, the data kept pushing back. Range didn’t always equal flexibility. Intelligence didn’t always mean resilience. And now, on birds, we have some solid evidence for why those assumptions don’t hold up.

, published in , looked at nearly 1,500 bird species and asked a deceptively simple question: what really determines how vulnerable a bird is to climate change?

Led by Dr. João Fabrício Mota Rodrigues and Dr. Carlos Botero from the University of Texas at Austin, the research went beyond traditional metrics like body size or range and took a more nuanced…