Gull in flight

Having used my big heavy lens (120-300mm 2.8) yesterday to get close-ups of the deer I thought it might be fun to try using it again for capturing birds in flight. I went down to the seawall this afternoon and there was the usual group of gulls about halfway down the beach with the odd one or two taking off and flying around from time to time. I took a load of shots under high continuous rate shooting but my success rate was pretty appalling. This was partly because I was using partial area autofocus which is fine when birds are high in the sky but not so good if they are flying low over the beach as the autofocus ends up focussing for the background rather than the bird. I guess my bif (birds in flight) technique is some what rusty and I need to practice using the lens more often which I'm afraid means I may be boring you with lots of gulls in flight over the next few days, hopefully  a bit shaper than today !