Freezing birds in flight

The key to freezing action shots is to use a very fast shutter speed.  Use a speed faster than you think is necessary, especially when shooting birds in flight.  The wing tip feathers are moving extremely fast, and if you want sharp detail as you can see here, then the shutter needs to be at least 1/1600th of a second.  For this picture of a snowy owl I just captured a few days ago during a workshop in Ontario, Canada, I used 1/3200th of a second and f/11 to make sure the entire bird was sharp.  The day was very bright, but in order to use these settings the ISO had to be fairly high.  I used 640 ISO in this case. Had the light been more muted, I would have raised the ISO until the shutter speed was fast enough.  That's the strategy.  No one likes digital noise, but that can be dealt with in post-processing (using Nik Dfine 2.0 or Topaz DeNoise).  You have to keep the shutter speed up to be able to see every portion of the bird with tack sharp clarity.