Fireball really turned on the afterburners yesterday and flew 582 km (362 miles) in a single day. This is over twice his average daily distance so far and one of his longest jumps for the season. He migrated completely through Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras and half of Guatemala in a single day!
Connecting the signals, it looks like he continued on up the coast of Nicaragua, flying past Managua and Leon, likely passed over the Bay of Fonseca and continued through the mountains of El Salvador. On this projected route, he would have bypassed Honduras altogether.
By late afternoon, he had entered Guatemala and by dark was about halfway through the country. He roosted in the forested highlands on a mountain ridge in the headwaters of the Motagua River about 29 km (18 miles) north of Guatemala City.
He has nearly caught up (latitudinally) with Chamiza over on the coast of Honduras and may pass her today.
IMPORTANT NOTE:
I was looking at the daily distances that Fireball has traveled thus far on his migration north. I wanted to see how his distance yesterday compared with his other daily totals.
I discovered that I had overlooked one position fix in Ecuador and had erroneously calculated his daily distance for 12 May. In fact, on that day, he covered an astounding 796 km (494 miles) across Peru and Ecuador, the longest single day distance of any of our birds this season and the second longest distance of the study over both spring migrations.
