How to photograph Birds

                  How to photograph Birds
The most critical technical issue is to get close. If you're patient, you're in luck. If you think bird photography is as easy as snapping away with a long lens, you're asking for trouble. My avid bird photographer friends spend hours every dawn and dusk crawling around in the mud sneaking up on birds, and even with 500mm lenses and mini cameras they are having to crop everything.
No matter how close you get, it's rarely close enough. I'll get into gear below, but your efforts are better spent learning how to get close and pay attention to light.
Instead of buying a 600mm lens, first consider a pair of waders or a blind which will give better results for one percent of the price!
Many people give up photographing wild birds because of the crummy results they usually get. It takes expensive equipment, a lot of patience and a lot of photos to get anything more than little specks.
I had to crop the image above, and that's a tame suburban dove. That doesn't really qualify as "wild." Tame birds are easy.
Like every USB camera, it needs to be interesting and be much more than just a record
Light is critical. I prefer side or back lighting and morning or afternoon light
Pen cameras make this easy. Use Nikon's Continuous AF (AF-C) mode or Canon's AI Servo mode. These modes let the cameras track moving subjects. Set your camera to use all the focus sensors. In Nikon this is the Dynamic AF Area Mode, whose icon is a box in the middle with little dots all around it. These modes let the camera use different AF sensors as the bird flies around in your frame.
It's trivial for any AF camera to track a moving bird against a blank sky. It's tougher if it's flying in front of a background, and even tougher if the bird is flying in between trees