I don’t know what you don’t understand. But since there’s no sharp point at all in the picture it isn’t a matter of wrong focussing but more movement. 1/1000 is to less for you. And for me too. I checked my old pictures for a shot at 200mm. A motor cross training I shot I used 1/3200 and from a tripod with ballhead.
George
Mike, i didn’t critised your bird pickures because i disn’t looked at them closely enough.
I am busy hanging armaturen, light, at the ceilings.
What i was refering to was the phyical problems you get wile the focallenght of the lens get larger.
Shutter speed. => you need to close down the lens a bit in order to avoid unsharpnes at the sides and corners due optical imperfections. So i have minimal needed f7.1. Because my lens is a f4.5-6.3. 100-300mm.
So shutter speed goes down when i zoom in. (it should go up for reasons of motionsblur.)
Aperture, the further i zoom in the more i need to closedown to keep enough DoF.
(aka it’s nearly impossible to retain a 10m DoF range.)
So when i am aiming my “long rifle”
Minimum shutter speed i need should be 1/125sec and 1/250sec is preferable.(edit: When the subject is more or less stationary.)
At 100mm i use around 6.3-7.1 and zooming more, longer focal lenght means i hope i can use f9.
F8 is minimum at 300mm
Second
Always pinpoint focus so i can place focus plane where I want it.
(or tracking mode)
Third
Backbutton lock for focuslock and exposure lock. (this way i can spray and pray in burst and have no unwanted inbetween refocusing. Just backbutton unlock relock for refocusing)
In trackingmode i lock it on the object.
Fourth
Iso value. => yes there it is again. AutoISO. 
restrain on desired minimum image quality and DR.
And yes i flunk alot when i try things with this “long rifle” lots of blue sky, wrong focal planes. Mis exposured, wrong/to small DoF point, cut off subjects, wrong moment, wrong shuttertime, wrong light angle…
And sometimes your just aced it, by luck mostly.
By knowing which mines there are in the field you can try to tiptow around them but the change you step on one is still 90%. When you in a hurry.
Little buggars when they do that 
Seriously though, I have great respect for birders (anything I get is more by luck than judgment), it’s a whole new level of skill as far as I’m concerned.
For any action shot:
Forget the rear screen, unless you’re using live view on a tripod.
Back button focus, AF-C mode
area focus locked in the middle with the smallest number of points you can reliably hit (you’d be surprised, I’m on 9 and I don’t shoot pistol)
set your exposure to the scene and fix it afterwards if it’s off a bit
if you can, I recommend you try, keep both eyes open
point and shoot, burst or not
do not fiddle with anything other than zoom until the birds have flown away and you’re waiting for new ones
That’s all I’ve got. If you get frustrated, take static pictures 
I read your step-by-step corrections, and I may document this for next time:
I printed this, and will keep the printout for future reference.
Thanks for posting.
This is the best photo I have ever taken of the cranes, and your improvements helped, a lot.
Maybe I’ll get this in my brain so I do things this well on my own - eventually.
I’ve rarely used the rear screen. I do better with the viewfinder. Without reading glasses, I can’t see the rear screen clearly enough anyway.
On the back of the D780 I have one button for AF-ON, which will focus the camera when I click it, or continuously focus for however long I hold it in. I also have a separate button for AE-L and AF-L. I need to look up what that does and how and when to use it. I’ve never touched it.
I will look at how I set it up, but I only have one small box which I think is the focus point. I just started to go through the focusing settings, and I see lots of things I need to change, including how to set the focus to “continuous” which I thought it was already set for. No wonder I’ve got out of focus photos when I “knew” they should be sharp". Ouch. Working on that now.
This means turning auto-ISO off. Sure, will do.
I never close one eye - I just ignore what the “other” eye sees.
not sure what you mean???
Once I correct the focus setting, I can do as you suggest.
If I get frustrated!!! I’m very often “frustrated”. Far too many new things to learn!!!
For photos like these, I need a MUCH higher shutter speed, to avoid movement from either the subject, or from me. I usually have time to think about this before pressing the shutter button. Will reconsider for next time.
Pinpoint focus - difficult to do, when the subject is moving…
Backbutton - I think I need to set the camera to continuous focus, as long as the button on the rear is pushed. Somehow I did this on the D750, and it worked fine. I’m going through the settings now, one by one.
Auto-ISO; I suspect I should follow Joanna’s advice, turn that off, and deal with any corrections as needed - but I tried this as the cranes were walking around, and for every good image there were also over or underexposed images. I’ll try this again.
That’s me. I try to keep things right, which works some of the time, but not all the time. Maybe I’ll improve, eventually, maybe even in this lifetime.
Aha! I’m sure Joanna knows all about this, but from five or six years ago, it’s something I completely forgot about. There is a side button on the left side of the camera which switches, as the rear control wheel is rotated between:
It gets better (worse?) when the front control wheel is rotated:
There is more:
(from https://photographylife.com/recommended-nikon-d750-settings#:~:text=Pressing%20the%20button%20in%20the,%2DS%20and%20AF%2DC.
"Now if you rotate the front dial with your index finger while holding the same button, you will get many different options like “S”, “D 9”, “D 21”, “D 51”, “3D”, “Grp” and “Aut”. These settings are there for controlling the focus points that you see inside the viewfinder."
(Lots more posted about the very similar D750 than the D780.)
I also found what I really need to focus on, no pun intended, that I knew 10 years ago:
https://photographylife.com/autofocus-modes
I will be going through this very slowly, maybe a few times, until I understand.
Joanna, do you use this stuff, or do you do it on your own?
There are two ways to Rome.
1 S priority and auto ISO. (exposure meatering uses isovalue to adjust.)
Adjust with your Aperture to lower ISO as good as possible.
2 light conditions are that challenging that shutterspeeds differ from 1/250 to 1/3000 and or higher. Birds in tree’s do need lower SS then flying in sky one’s which you also need to overexpose in order to get the shadowed belly in color.
Then i raise ISO to 3200iso (or any other value which give me 1/1000sec or higher ) and set in Amode the desired DoF and hope for the best in my shutterspeeds.
Eye ball the shutterspeed and adjust isovalue by hand.
My fz200 had a function in A mode as in set minimum shutterspeed. Like 1/250sec Or 1/1000sec. And then i could let autoiso do its thing.
My g80 doesn’t have this option so i have to manual control minimum SS.
I suspect the only choice for me to use is the second one, not using auto-ISO.
Even if Joanna wasn’t pushing me towards this, it makes sense to me. Although, as a bird is moving or flying around, between sunlight and shade, I will most likely rely on adjusting the images on PhotoLab later, and accept the over/under exposure…
Which of those choices do you typically prefer?
I also found an excellent video, created by Nikon, which explains and shows how these work:
Enough of this for now - lots more reading and watching and learning to do today.
Wow, amazing shot!
First thought - that is a spectacular image?
Second thought - I will never catch up to you, in 500 years!
That is beautiful!
I will work to get better, but it would be like my going out on a sports field, in the uniform, and trying to play whatever sport it is. I might have the capability, but not without working my way up to it, which would take many years, not months, or weeks, or days. One thought is that you are so much better, but even you had to start somewhere, and work your way up to what you can do now, and your understanding.
OK, back to work. The least I can do is select the proper settings for my D780, including the ones I’ve never thought about, let alone, used.
For AF-S, I use S and for AF-C, I use Grp.
And yet, without your mentioning it, I would possibly never have switched to using back button focusing.
No matter how much experience we have, there’s always something we don’t know - yet.
In the link you posted the photographer said he always uses AF-A with weddings. Listen to his arguments.
George
I guess that’s true for all of us.
And, the more critical people are of my images, the more I want to do better.
One last photograph for today, which I took on several days, at different times, but this is the only one that “worked”. There is an upside-down rowboat on my brother’s property, and I wanted too many things to be as I imagined. I wanted to pond to be flat, with a lovely reflection. I wanted to show the surroundings, with the trees and plants. And I wanted to show how “decrepit” the boat is, but that’s only visible when my image is viewed at full size.
I hardly did anything in way of editing, just a wee bit. For better or worse, it is exactly what I had in my mind, what I wanted the image to show. There are a few tools (vignetting for one) that I used for almost the lowest possible setting. The reflection at the left is of an area near the sun, so I deliberately left it so bright.
I never opened it on my laptop, only my Mac mini, so I didn’t get the error message I’ve been fighting. It’s pretty much a full-screen image, but for a slight correction to the horizon.
780_1217 | 2023-06-05.nef (29.9 MB)
780_1217 | 2023-06-05.nef.dop (14.4 KB)
I changed it from AF-C which I was going to try, to AF-A.
I also set the tracking to 3-D, to try out.
Thanks - it’s a good starting point for me.
Nice one Mike, @mikemyers
I personally quite like this one. The foliage on the right stops the pond taking your eye out of the picture.
Just two points. The sky between the fork of the tree, I suspect needs to be toned down a tad and the same with the white spot to the left of the tree as they tend to draw your eye. Apart from that I can’t fault it.
A word of advice (yes, another) don’t! Stay with what you know and stop jumping from stool to stool
I haven’t been using either of them, but I think long ago I used AF-C.
I just set it back to "C(continuous focusing for any time the back button is pressed in).
I also switched auto-ISO off.
What do you have selected for these settings on your D850?
Thank you, now fixed.
It’s that pesky sun that broke through, both from the sky, and the reflection from the sky.
