Like the scratching of the tern posted yesterday, the behavior depicted here may be more common than you may think. I have also seen a tern do this twice. While in flight, I watched this tern - I believe it is a Caspian - drop the fish eleven different times and recatch it. My guess is it was trying to get a fish that was at the upper limits of what it could swallow, in the best position to swallow it. Still, to see it intentionally drop the fish, then overtake and reacquire it over and over again was amazing to watch. The second time I saw the same action, the tern had caught a small flounder called a hogchoker, which would have also been difficult to swallow.
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