Six journeys, six interactive maps. Every route is built from published tracking data rather than artistic licence, and each map opens on today’s date — so you are looking at roughly where the real animals are right now.

Two of these barely move across the map and still walk 3,000 kilometres a year. Wildebeest and caribou travel in loops rather than lines, which is why a short route can mean an enormous journey.

Serengeti – Mara The Great Migration 1.3 million wildebeest walking an 800 km loop. Two river crossings, one calving season, and a quarter of a million that do not make it. Open the map → Worldwide Humpback Whale Fourteen populations across every ocean, all heading for the tropics — but six months apart. Watch both hemispheres change places. Open the map → North Pacific Gray Whale The Arctic to Baja California and back, hugging the shoreline the whole way. Mothers and calves leave the lagoons weeks after everyone else. Open the map → North America Monarch Butterfly One butterfly flies the whole way south to central Mexico. It takes three or four more, each living a few weeks, to work the family back north. Open the map → Pacific & Asia Bar-Tailed Godwit Eleven days in the air, 13,560 km, no food and no landing. The longest non-stop flight ever recorded for any bird. Open the map → The Arctic Caribou & Reindeer The longest round trip walked by any animal, seen from above the pole — wild herds in Alaska, herded reindeer in Sápmi, and the collapse of both. Open the map →