This is Bird Note. It's a sunny September morning at Red Rock Canyon in the Mojave Desert.

I spot hummingbirds, flycatchers, and a family of gambles quail. But what I'm really after are birds of

prey, and I don't see any. As it turns out, desert raptors are being hit extra hard by climate change.

So desert species have a special set of challenges.

We're really getting extreme warming in the southwest.

Blair Wolf is a biologist at the University of New Mexico.

He says that hotter and drier deserts mean less water,

leading to fewer plants and therefore less prey.

And that leads to a general, more difficult problem for raptors to find food necessary

for both energy and water. Raptors get most of their water from the food they eat.

Which can lead to lower rates of reproduction.

They've got to be able to make eggs and then find food for their nestlings.

Heat stress itself, even a few degrees of warming, can be a cause of death for raptors.

In recent years, we've seen record-breaking temperatures sweeping across the southwest.

When temperatures aren't even dropping below 95 or 100

degrees at night until 3 in the morning, you know you've got a problem. And it's only getting

hotter. I get back into my car without seeing a single raptor. But on the drive home, there it is,

a turkey vulture, circling high above the greenest grass around, a water-guzzling

golf course. This artificial ecosystem is an accidental oasis for a bird, but it doesn't

solve the long-term problems they're facing in the desert. For Bird Note, I'm Sonia Swanson.