Environmental change is becoming synchronous across sites with frequent emergence of extremes in recent years, with potential impacts on species’ synchronous abundance over large scales. Analyzing 41 years of breeding bird survey data across North America, we observed that some birds showed mostly lower tail-dependent spatial synchrony (i.e., synchrony across sites at low abundances), while others showed mostly upper tail-dependent spatial synchrony (i.e., synchrony across sites at high abundances). We found that spatial synchrony in climate extremes (i.e., tail-dependence in climate), not the dispersal trait (hand-wing index), drove the spatial synchrony in abundance extremes (i.e., tail-dependence in abundance) up to 250 Km. Tail-dependence in high (or low, respectively) temperature across sites caused lower (or upper, respectively) tail-dependent spatial synchrony in abundance. In a rapidly changing environment, these findings highlight the importance of considering synchronized climatic extremes to assess species’ tail-dependent spatial synchrony across large scales.