When a battered, skinny tortoiseshell cat wandered into a yard
in Florida earlier this year, she could have been any other
stray, but she was nothing of the kind. She carried an implanted
microchip—one put there by a loving owner—and it revealed an
intriguing story: the cat belonged to a local family, had been
lost on a trip two months earlier, and had traveled 200 miles
(322 km) in that time to arrive back in her hometown. Her
journey inspired a spate of articles looking for an explanation
for how this one cat, and a few others who’ve made similar
trips, managed such impressive feats of navigation. The response
from many eminent animal researchers was the same: “No idea.”
Cats’ long-distance travels are relatively rare in the
scientific literature, which explains the dearth of answers—at
least so far. But that’s not the case for the wanderings of
sundry other creatures, especially those that migrate. Such
extreme journeys—mapless, compassless, sometimes
intercontinental, through places the animals have never