There’s another possibility. You’ll notice by passing your cursor over the images (doing so\u00a0makes the image file number appear on all but some\u00a0handheld devices) that there are two photos missing between the second and third images. For whatever reason I apparently deleted them many months ago and now\u00a0I wish I hadn’t. Maybe, just maybe, the pellet we see in the third and fourth\u00a0photos is a second one, expelled immediately after the pellet in the first and second shots. And that second pellet was flung to the side when the hawk shook its head to aid in expelling it. Raptors sometimes do exactly that (shake their heads) to help get rid of a stubborn pellet.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\nTo me the second scenario seems most likely, partly because the head shaking could account for the reason the pellet broke up into pieces. But since these shots were apparently\u00a0taken in a burst, only .3 second would have passed between the second and third photo (to account for the two missing images) and I’m not sure that would have been enough time for the first pellet to drop completely out of frame and<\/em> the second one to be expelled by shaking\u00a0and then\u00a0travel as far is it did in the third shot. If it was enough time it was close.<\/p>\nI sure wish I hadn’t deleted those two\u00a0photos which might have\u00a0confirmed what really<\/em> happened.<\/p>\nMuch ado about nothing I suppose but I have a hard time putting little mysteries like this behind me…<\/p>\n
Ron<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
And there’s a bit of a mystery involved with this one.<\/p>\n
Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":51342,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[5,334,395,645],"tags":[647,555,407,220,646],"class_list":["post-51340","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bird-oddities","category-birds","category-miscellaneous","category-swainsons-hawks","tag-buteo-swainsoni","tag-centennial-valley","tag-expelling-a-pellet","tag-montana-2","tag-swainsons-hawk"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/swainsons-hawk-9198-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-dm4","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51340","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51340"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51340\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/51342"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51340"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51340"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51340"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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<\/a><\/p>\n