Waypoints visualizes data about the outdoors.

Every spring, thousands of mule deer leave Wyoming's Red Desert and travel 150 miles north to the high country. They don't hurry. They surf the green wave, timing their climb so they arrive at each elevation just as new growth peaks. The whole migration funnels through a handful of bottlenecks — some only a few hundred meters wide — and collar data is what revealed them: the longest mule deer migration ever recorded hid in plain sight until 2013.

One bottleneck sat so close to development that keeping it open cost $2.1 million. Corridors like this now decide the future of Western mule deer, and the maps are how they get protected. The diamonds on the map above are the pinch points — hover them.

Woodcock don't migrate in flocks. Each bird lifts off at dusk, alone, flies a few dark hours low over the trees, and drops into thick young forest before dawn. For most of history that made the migration invisible: the birds were here, then they weren't.

Since 2017, researchers have fitted hundreds of woodcock with GPS transmitters lighter than a nickel, and the route finally has a shape — hops of 20 to 150 miles, long stopovers in river-bottom cover, a chain of habitat running from Canada to the Gulf. Lose a link and the chain breaks. Hover any stopover on the map to see the date and the cover the bird chose.

In the early 1800s, passenger pigeons may have outnumbered every other bird in North America combined — flights that darkened the sky for three days, nestings that covered 850 square miles. Then the telegraph and the railroad found the colonies. The last great nesting, in 1878, was emptied by rail at roughly 50,000 birds a day.

By September 1914 the species was a single elderly female in a Cincinnati zoo cage — and then it was zero. There is no GPS track for a passenger pigeon. The points on the map are drawn from ledgers, newspapers, and testimony: the only flight path the species has left.