[runswithscissors]

It's easy to make a zero clearance auxiliary table for a bandsaw. Simply take a piece of plywood the size of your table, and saw straight to the middle of it. Stop. Now tape the plywood to the BS table to fix it in place. Provides a solid surface under even the smallest chunk.

I surmise that because the offcut piece was inside a closed loop, it had nowhere to drop out of the way, so the blade grabbed it.