Where the Animals Go:
Tracking Wildlife with Technology in 50 Maps & Graphics

“This book is beautiful as well as informative and inspiring. There is no doubt it will help in our fight to save wildlife and wild habitats.”

— Dr. Jane Goodall

“Where the Animals Go is beautiful and thrilling, a combination of the best in science and exposition, and a joy to study cover to cover.”

— Edward O. Wilson

For thousands of years, tracking animals meant following footprints. Now satellites, drones, camera traps, cellphone networks, and accelerometers reveal the natural world as never before. Where the Animals Go is the first book to offer a comprehensive, data-driven portrait of how creatures like ants, otters, owls, turtles, and sharks navigate the world.

Based on pioneering research by scientists at the forefront of the animal-tracking revolution, James Cheshire and Oliver Uberti’s stunning, four-color charts and maps tell fascinating stories of animal behavior. These astonishing infographics explain how warblers detect incoming storms using sonic vibrations, how baboons make decisions, and why storks prefer garbage dumps to wild forage; they follow pythons racing through the Everglades, a lovelorn wolf traversing the Alps, and humpback whales visiting undersea mountains.

Where the Animals Go is a triumph of technology, data science, and design, bringing broad perspective and intimate detail to our understanding of the animal kingdom.

excerpts

In this set of graphics, we plotted the GPS tracks of elephant seals. A young male named Rudolf (red) was tagged on South Georgia by Mike Fedak and his team from the Sea Mammal Research Unit at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. Elephant seal…

On this map, we show a grid of 89 camera traps that Mathias Tobler (San Diego Zoo Global) used to detect jaguars in the Peruvian Amazon. Yellow circles indicate the number of jaguar sightings at each camera; blue contours show the extent of individu…

How do you track an individual ant, let alone a full colony? In this study, Danielle Mersch and her team at the University of Lausanne glued tiny barcodes to the backs of carpenter ants and placed them inside climate-controlled boxes. Then, after fi…

On this map, we show the light logger tracks of two grey-headed albatrosses tagged by the British Antarctic Survey in 1999. One (turquoise) made a trip from South Georgia to the Indian Ocean and back; the other (red) followed polar winds round the e…

On this map, we show the GPS tracks of 25 baboons from a troop of 46 near the Mpala Research Centre in Kenya over a four-week period. From these meandering loops, we can see where they foraged. We can see the wide berth they gave villagers. We can s…

REVIEWS

“[Where the Animals Go] is an enthralling volume, downright gorgeous in its illustrations and text. Its double intent is brilliant, too—to bring each of us closer to the animal world and to highlight fresh ways to think about conservation.”
—Barbara King, NPR

“Where the Animals Go elegantly elucidates the role new technologies has played in expanding our knowledge of animal migration.”
—Science

“An enthralling look at the world that technology can help us uncover . . . Exquisite.”
—Emily Scragg, British Trust for Ornithology

“Cheshire and Uberti write about billions of data points being collected—some by citizen scientists—and their ravishing maps put this information to good use…[They] show us with precision and clarity where the animals go.”
—The Washington Post

“In recent years, technology has made it possible to track animal movements from afar in more and more detail… [Cheshire and Uberti] have dipped into this deluge of data to create 50 beautiful and engaging maps that reveal the wanderings of animals.”
—National Geographic

“[A] stunning translation of movement onto paper.”
—Scientific American

“[W]ell laid out, easy to understand, and a pleasure to return to many times.”
—Seattle Times

”An exciting volume. Expertly designed and backed with expansive and authoritative datasets . . . Where the Animals Go is a book well worth adding to one’s collection.”
—Harrison Cole, Cartographic Perspectives

“Attractive and informative . . . a delight to read.”
—Ian Newton, British Birds

“A striking example of how innovative technology can be used to increase our understanding of the natural world.”
—Financial Times

“This is a special kind of detective story. After millennia of using footprints, feces, feathers, broken foliage and nests to track animals, the process is now so teched up you need to read this book to find out the how, what and why.”
—New Scientist

“This book of beautiful maps, created using modern technologies, traces the various movements of wild animals, from loggerhead sea turtles to emperor penguins.”
—Lydia Millet