The American three-toed woodpecker was always rare in New York, but warmer winters in the Adirondacks—probably the bird’s only stronghold in the state—may have pushed this winter-tolerant species farther north forever.
“The three-toed woodpecker is gone from the Adirondacks only in the last decade,” ornithologist Jeremy Kirchman, the curator of birds and mammals at the New York State Museum, said in a recent interview. The bird, he said, may be the first to leave New York because of a warming climate.
As Kirchman and others monitoring climate change in the Adirondacks realize, this small, unflashy species will also probably not be the last boreal bird to dwindle in the Adirondacks and then disappear from the region.
Fifteen years ago, if you asked almost any ornithologist about the biggest threat to birds, they would have cited habitat loss. Habitat loss remains a serious problem, but now biologists better understand how changes in habitat are linked to two key elements of climate change: temperature and precipitation. In the Adirondack Park, that relationship between habitat and climate change is illustrated
