It must be something that flies

These flying things must be creatures or behave as creatures

Cognition involves all sort of subjective abstract processes taking place in the interaction between beings and environment. Interaction is performed by acquiring information via perceptual senses and releasing action via physical action.
The whole colourful "image" of life and action in life, every aspect of existence, of self-consciousness or of consciousness of the outside world is a result of both cognitive processes and of how these cognitive processes are fed and acted via the perceptual and action means.
In other words, a "being" is a result of both its inner processes and the actual characterisation of its interactive boundary: the two aspects are shaping each other.

There exist many debated definitions of cognition. Here, i use the one just given

Alive entities are naturally integrated from a cognitive point of view: their whole perceptual/action hardware is there already and actually makes them be and perform as they simply are in their natural environment.
Extending alive entities in a perceptual and action world different from the one they were born for, implies to integrate techniques on the perception and action front in a way to be properly received by the existing perceptive, cognitive and action substrate. This "contextualisation" process is usually referred in engineering terms as to "integrate" something.