Caspian Tern III (Continued)

Questions arise in my mind about whether a Caspian Tern will drop the fish accidentally or whether it is intentional. They seem highly confident that they can re-acquire the fish before it reaches the ground - or the water. Since objects fall at the same rate of speed, the tern has to have some means of increasing it's speed over the normal rate of fall. That would be the wing position shown in the opening photo. If you notice in the photos, every time it is actually trying to catch up to the fish, it wing's are in this position.

Another question that comes to my mind is whether there is any real advantage to letting the fish fall and grabbing it again. Any fish is going to be heavier in front so that a fish in free fall is going to be falling head first.  Yet, the tern is coming from behind where it would probably grab the back end first so that it is no better off than before the fish was dropped.  That makes me think that dropping the fish is really not intended and the fish just gets away from them when they are struggling to get it headed in the right direction while it still has it in it's bill.

It appears the tern finally got the fish in the right position and is swallowing it, but something wasn't right. It ended up dropping it a few more times. While there are gaps in this series where I didn't post all the pictures, these are in chronological order. As you can see in the next image, the fish REALLY got away from the tern. In fact, the fish (which has probably already expired) made it all the way to the water.

I'm not sure what causes a fish to float. Maybe the fish isn't quite dead. Fish that are dying will float, but I can think of at least one occasion where I dropped a fish that had recently expired back into the river (from a boat) and the fish went right to the bottom. 

I took a total of 49 photos in this series. The first was at 9:04:50; the last was at 9:09:40 - almost exactly five minutes. That is an eternity for a incident like this.