Bird Watching: What's your most disappointing photo of the day?!, 1 by kennedyh

kennedyh wrote:
They are pretty good shots nevertheless. Your shot that shows the birds tongue brings back memories for me. In your photo, you can just see that a hawk's tongue is like an arrowhead, it has two backward pointing lobes (barbs) like an arrowhead.

I used to hold a bird-banding licence and some 30 years back, I was mist-netting birds near my home which was then in Tasmania. I went to check the nets and found a Brown Falcon - Falco berigora at the base of one of the nets. Raptors are not often caught by mist nets, although they well sometimes attack small birds that are caught in the net. This bird was not in the net, but caught by its tongue. The tongue had gone through one mesh of the net and the barbs prevented it from withdrawing. The bird had twisted round many, perhaps twenty times, in its attempts to free itself. It was not an easy task to untangle the bird, having to hold the bird, avoiding talons and beak, and twist it round and round before it was possible to ease the net off its tongue. As far as I could tell its tongue was not badly damaged and the bird flew away strongly when it was finally released. Here is the bird just before it was released: