In the middle of last September, Cory Overton started receiving odd texts and instant messages from his colleagues. Their gist was, in his words: “What’s up with that weird goose?” The “weird goose” was a Tule Goose fitted with a GPS tracker, one of a protected population of Greater White-fronted Geese that nests in Alaska and winters in California marshes. Overton, a U.S. Geological Survey wildlife biologist, and his colleagues were keeping tabs on the bird as part of a waterfowl-tracking project that’s been running since 2015. Because the goose wore a GPS tag, they could follow its location from their computers. Overton took a look: Instead of showing up near its usual stopover site at Summer Lake in central Oregon, the bird was about 300 miles off course in the Idaho Panhandle. “As far as we knew, nobody had ever confirmed the Tule Goose in Idaho before,” Overton recalls. “That's really far outside of what we would expect.” The team wondered about the...