I took this unusual picture of a macaw in flight in Costa Rica on the photo tour that just ended. It was flying directly at the camera, and in my experience that means the camera can’t accurately hold focus on the bird no matter what auto tracking focus mode is used.
Therefore, the way I was able to take a sharp picture was to pre-focus on a place ahead of the macaw (using manual focus, not the auto focus mode) and with a multiple-frame burst fire just before it reached that focus point. One frame turned out to be sharp. This is a cropped image. Had I tried to fill the frame by using a 500mm lens, I'm sure the picture wouldn't have been sharp simply because the depth of field is so shallow on a super telephoto lens. For this picture, I used a 70-200mm lens plus a 1.4x teleconverter. The 320mm focal length gave me a fairly small bird in the overall frame, but at least it's sharp.