Make some feathered friends

Take the long view with a telephoto lens that goes the distance

Thanks to the reduction in road traffic and aviation noise, garden birds have become easier to hear and therefore easier to locate. Even so, they tend to be very timid, so you need to be stealthy and keep your distance. Indeed, you might even stay indoors and shoot through an open window, from behind an improvised hide.

You’ll need a long telephoto lens to cover the distance. There’s a case for saying the longer the better, as a ‘super-telephoto’ lens with a really long focal length will enable you to fill most of the frame with a small bird, even when shooting from quite a distance.

There are some fabulous lenses to choose from, including the Nikon AF-S 180-400mm f/4e TC1.4 FL ED VR zoom with its built-in teleconverter, and the Nikon AF-S 600mm f/4e FL ED VR prime, but they’re fiendishly expensive at around £11,000/$12,300 each.

At the other end of the scale, budget telephoto zooms with a range of around 50-250mm or 70-300mm can work well on DX format cameras. The 1.5x crop factor boosts the effective range to 75-375mm or 105-450mm respectively, in full-frame terms. Thanks to the wonderfully impressive megapixel count of most current and recent Nikon SLRS and mirrorless cameras, there’s also the option of further cropping images at the post-proudction stage. It’s not ideal, but you can get away with cropping quite severely if you don’t need to create large-format prints.

The next step up is a 100-400mm zoom, which gives useful telephoto reach on a full-frame camera and takes you into super-telephoto territory on a DX body, with an equivalent zoom range of 150-600mm. The Sigma and Tamron 100-400mm lenses are both very good, matching the Nikon AF-S 80-400mm f/4.5-5.6g ED VR for image quality and costing just a third of the price, or thereabouts. If you can afford to stretch the budget a little, Nikon’s AF-S 200-500mm VR is a tempting proposition, while the Sigma and Tamron 150-600mm lenses deliver class-leading telephoto reach. That’s easily powerful enough on a fullframe body and, if you mount one on a DX format camera, you’ll get a mighty 225-900mm effective zoom range.