Freedom to Roam is Patagonia’s current environmental campaign. Its goal is to create, restore and protect wildways or corridors between habitats so animals can survive. Throughout this year, Patagonia will focus on climate-change threats that sensitive animals face and how corridors can help. Join us in this fight to help animals survive in a warming world.

Climate change affects different animals in different ways.

SALMON
Swimming nearly 1,000 miles inland and climbing more than 6,500 feet in elevation from the mouth of the Columbia River to the rivers of the Rocky Mountains of Idaho, Snake River sockeye salmon are unique—they climb higher than any other salmon on earth. Unfortunately, humans have further complicated this already difficult migration by adding hydroelectric and transportation dams to the lower Snake and Columbia Rivers.

As many as 15 million salmon once returned to the Snake River Basin but after a century of dammed rivers, habitat loss, pollution, climate change and overfishing, just one percent of these populations return today.

Successfully restoring a free-flowing lower Snake River would constitute the largest river restoration effort in American history. A comprehensive science-based solution to the Northwest’s salmon crisis must include the removal of the four lower Snake River dams, a mission that’s moved beyond regional borders. Read more about salmon and dams in The Idaho Tide.

WOLVERINES
Feisty predators whose ancestors date back to the Ice Age, wolverines need deep, persistent snowpack and places where summers don’t get too hot. Pregnant wolverines need high altitude snow dens to give birth. White as polar bears, newborn wolverines need lots of snow overhead for insulation, especially when mom is away hunting. Climate change will bring reduced snowpack and warmer temperatures. Corridors for the wolverine would enable females to travel to remote, high-altitude, snow-packed areas suitable for deep snow dens. Also needed are protected areas where wolverines are safe from traps laid for other animals. Only a small population of wolverines remain in the contiguous United States. Read about wolverines in "Badass But Vulnerable."

PINTAIL DUCKS
We often think that birds are immune to changes on the land below them but migrating birds require places to rest and refuel as they journey. The Northern Pintail duck migrates south from Alaska to Colorado and east through the upper Midwest, Great Lakes, and eastern Canada. Since the 1970s predators, water shortages, agricultural development, contamination and urban growth have cut the pintail’s population in half.

Climate change will exacerbate yet another threat: many pintails nest in critical wetlands of the Great Plains Prairie Pothole Region. This region is already vulnerable to drought. Climate change will very likely make these droughts worse and more persistent. Corridors for the pintail require restoration of drained wetlands in the eastern part of the Prairie Pothole Region.

Visit our Corridors and Climate Change Action Center to learn how you can further get involved in protecting threatened wildlife.

(Top Image) Sockeye Salmon (Oncorhynchus nerka) showing breeding color during spawning season, Prince William Sound, Alaska. Photo: National Geographic / Hiroya Minakuchi

(Middle Image) Gulo gulo, skunk bear, carcajou, gulon, wolverine ... ­many names, one magnificent animal. Photo: Daniel J. Cox

(Bottom Image) Northern Pintail (Anas acuta). Photo: National Geographic / Hans Dekker