KevinFRK

I should have added that I'd tried that and got nothing - which surprised me as usually very good (though Sound ID can be a bit addictive)

And not entirely to my surprise, Windhover is even in the Oxford English Dictionary!

Try this one - still messed with, but gives more of the shadows

Which, just cropped out of the camera's RAW format (suffering from the classic dark bird against white sky issue with auto-ISO) was

Since the swallows were back in roughly the same place, and same (decent) light today, I tried with 1/2000s - and got a couple of shots that were clear improvements. E.g.

So, Canon R6 + RF200-800mm lens at full length, F9, ISO 1250, Exposure bias on camera +1 step at the suggested 1/2000s

To give a sense of cropping/distance, that's 296 x 296 pixels from a camera whose full frame is 5472 x 3648

Trying for the photos hand held for twenty minutes or so (with rests) left me with extremely tired arms!

Oh! Thank you.

I'd assumed you were just using it's standard nickname (e.g. Jenny Wren or Robin Redbreast). I wonder whether it is named from it's cousin's English nickname. As an example of that, Robins were once just "Redbreasts", got nicknamed Robin, and somehow, the nickname became the standard way to name them. As you can perhaps tell, this derivation amuses me

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?