Fast mover

This is a lucky shot.  Getting shots of small birds in the air is far from easy.  

Watching the Great Tit take off, I just managed to track it in the air for three frames, but by the fourth I only have part of the bird, the rest is out of frame.  That's shooting at 1/5000ths and 20 FPS - and even so the bird's wings are moving too fast to be seen clearly here.

Trying to anticipate when the bird will take off so that I can pan the camera to follow seems to be a complete lottery.  I generally miss the moment of take off and reacquire the bird a fraction of a second later, only to then have it fly out of frame a fraction of a second after that. 

It can be immensely frustrating as you miss lovely shots of birds in flight, but I find the whole process quite therapeutic and I think I might be getting slightly better at it.  It's either that, or the laws of chance - if I spray enough shots at enough small birds, eventually one of them will hit the target, like today ;-)