There are many websites on which the public can name, sponsor and follow tagged animals. I regularly visit one run by the British Trust for Ornithology, which tracks the annual journeys of individual cuckoos between Britain and Africa as part of a larger project investigating the species’ rapid population decline in Britain: 65 percent have been lost since the 1980s for reasons that are still unclear.

Today the Internet informed me that a cuckoo called David has reached his home in Wales, though it’s hard to know what home means to a cuckoo: The project has shown that some spend only 15 percent of their lives in their countries of origin. I click on David’s photograph, and then those of 16 other tagged cuckoos, nervous, golden-eyed bundles of gray feathers held in scientists’ hands, so different from the fast-flying, sharp-winged silhouettes that flicker between trees near my house in spring. Each cuckoo’s current position is represented on screen by a clickable icon on a Google Earth map. Colored lines trace their flights from England across Europe and North Africa, over the Sahara and into the humid forest zone where they spend their winters. The default satellite view on the website has no overlays indicating cities or countries. It encourages you to see the world as an animal does: a place without politics or borders, without humans at all, merely a series of habitats marching climatically from cool northern mountains to the thick rain forests of Angola and Congo.

Projects like this give us imaginative access to the lives of wild creatures, but they cannot capture the real animals’ complex paths. Instead we watch virtual animals moving across a world of eternal daylight built from a patchwork of layered satellite and aerial imagery, a flattened, static landscape free of happenstance: There are no icy winds over high mountain passes, heavy rains, soaring hawks, ripening crops or recent droughts. Despite these simplifications, following a tagged animal on a map is an addictive pursuit. It’s hard not to become invested in its fate. The bird might die, the tag might fail. You do not know where it will travel next. The bird is unaware of the eyes that watch its progress, and you veer from a sense of power at your ability to surveil at a distance to the knowledge that you are powerless to influence what happens next.

The more you watch, the more you feel that you are somehow taking the cuckoo’s journey, too, that you are engaged on a virtual exploration of the globe. The fantasy of a borderless world is quickly replaced by visions of heroic exploration. You take up the part of a lone traveler engaged on an arduous quest to cross countries and conquer unknown spaces on the map. Because satellite tracking is expensive, we can follow the progress of only a few named animals. We become attached to them as they make their astonishing journeys. We watch young cuckoos find their way to Africa with no parental help. We see loggerhead turtles swim nearly 7,500 miles from feeding grounds off Mexico to the beaches of Japan to nest; discover bar-headed geese migrating over the Himalayas and enduring extreme and sudden changes in elevation that would disable or kill a human; we marvel at the bar-tailed godwits that make a nine-day, 11,000-kilometer nonstop flight from Alaska to New Zealand across the Pacific Ocean. To us, these appear remarkable feats of physical endurance; we cannot help measuring the capacities of animals against our own.