Nice - which wagtail is that?

This is actually the truly crazy (and heavy!) RF200-800mm, with F9 at 800mm (and they do one even madder at x4 the price or so).

Sadly, Canon don’t let others use their RF interfaces, so I’d guess Sigma, etc. don’t try hard to work with Canon anymore.

I know for birds the ideal is closer to the suggested 1/2000s, but in practice that seems out of reach without doing bad things to the ISO with this lens/body. While the camera was doing auto-ISO to 100-350, the photos needed quite a bit of increased brightness when processing (RAW of course) to bring out the bird, so there was little to spare. And this, in sunshine. If I’d been thinking, some exposure compensation on the camera would have been sensible, but I doubt the end result would be much better.

Not that I’m aware of - just eats storage and battery! That said, with a heavy camera, you’re unlikely to keep it firmly on target for much of the burst!

I think what’s happening is the long focal length allowing distant shots is giving a much greater depth of being in focus, combined with decent sunlight, and often trees in the full frame that are the right sort of distance way (these are massively cropped down from the full frames). This gives a better chance of the auto-focus getting it right. Also, swallows do have slower glide phases in their flight which can help to get on target. What I was forgetting is to try burst shooting to up my chances.

Yes, there’s both buzzards and kites around here - very similar life-styles.

Thanks for continuing the story!

Nice shot, but are osprey nests always that rough & ready?

I think it fairly obvious that the first European settlers in North America were far from Ornithologists :)

As you’ve most likely already seen to find those links, Red-tailed hawks and (what I think of as) a Buzzard share a genus Buteo.

OK, that would be a danger to my wallet!

TY