Depth of field issues

We expect to photograph birds with the longest lens possible, but sometimes they surprise us. I took this picture of a yellow-billed hornbill in Kenya with a 70-200mm lens set to 200mm. It perched on a tree right next to my Land Rover. I waited until the bird turned its head so I could capture that striking profile. When birds with large beaks look directly at the camera, depth of field becomes a real challenge. When focusing on the eyes -- which is correct -- the beak will be out of focus unless you use f/16 or f/22. For this shot, because the head and the beak were parallel to the plane of the digital sensor, I used the settings 1/1250, f/7.1, and 250 ISO.