Little bee eater in flight

Little bee eaters are extremely hard to capture in flight because they are so incredibly fast.  I spent about an hour with this pair in Lake Nakuru National Park, Kenya, trying to capture the action.  The only reason I could get a shot like this was because the birds would return to the same perch again and again, so I could pre-focus on one spot.  Still, I had to focus my attention intently on the tiny subjects as I watched them through the camera because they would take flight and land as fast as -- it seemed -- a bolt of lightning. The problem with this picture, of course, is the background.  It's messy.  I will experiment with replacing it when I get home from Africa, but even so, I like the image very much.  Technically, this was a real challenge.  The light was low and I was shooting with the Canon 7D Mark II.  This camera is much better than its predecessor, but it still has a lot of noise.  1600 ISO and above just doesn't look good.  In order to freeze the wings, I had to use 1/3200th of a second (at f/8), and that meant the ISO had to be 4000.  I took this with the equivalent of a 896mm lens (400mm plus the crop factor of 1.6 plus a 1.4x teleconverter).  This picture does have a lot of noise, especially since I had to crop it.  I had no choice in this situation, though.  I will be buying the new Canon 1Dx Mark II shortly, and that will solve the noise issue at ISO settings of 6400 and below.  This new camera will also give me a faster frame rate -- 14 frames per second instead of 10.  That will allow me to capture nuances in the wing formations of birds that I'm missing now.