With its extensive adaptations to cold, snowy climates, the ptarmigan is threatened by warmer winter temperatures and forests that will creep uphill and eliminate its alpine habitat. Bicknell’s thrush is jeopardized by the loss of its native high-elevation forests due to warming, as well as acid rain damage to red spruce. The ‘i‘iwi was once widespread throughout the Hawaiian Islands, but is now restricted to high-elevation areas on the Big Island and Maui because of the spread of avian pox and malaria by mosquitoes, which are already moving uphill with a warming climate.
Mountaintop species are particularly vulnerable to climate change because as the climate warms, they have nowhere to go. “These four species are literally going to be pushed off the top of the mountain.” “Climate change will have disproportionate impacts on species that live at high elevations,” said Noah Greenwald, endangered species program director at the Center. All four are limited to high-elevation mountaintops, where a shifting climate threatens to eliminate their habitat. songbird and the San Bernardino flying squirrel of Southern California. PORTLAND, Ore.- The Center for Biological Diversity today filed petitions to protect four mountaintop species, from Hawaii to New Hampshire, that are threatened by climate change, including the ‘i‘iwi, a Hawaiian songbird the white-tailed ptarmigan, a grouse-like bird of the Rocky Mountains Bicknell’s thrush, a northeastern U.S. Endangered Species Act Protections Sought for Four Mountaintop Species
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