The 5 Best Birding Cameras: DSLR, Mirrorless and Superzoom

Written by

Alex Gillard

Since 2015 I have been a freelance writer and wildlife photographer, working out of some of the planet’s most spectacular wildlife and nature travel destinations–from the Amazon to Raja Ampat–diving, snorkelling, fieldherping, birding and photographing my way around the world.

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I’ve been hooked on birdwatching since I was 6 years old when my dad first took me to see the impressive bald eagle congregations along British Columbia’s Fraser River.

At 7 I was already asking for Audobon guides for Christmas, and once I was old enough (and had enough money) to bird seriously, I followed my wildlife and bird photography passion around the world to some fabulous birding destinations–from Panama to Raja Ampat. 

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For several years, I was lucky enough to live in, perhaps, the Mecca of bird photography–Colombia–home to the world’s highest avian diversity, and I had the good fortune to experience some of the country’s top birding spots alongside serious bird lovers and guides; from the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta to the flooded plains of the Orinoco to the northwest Amazonian piedmont. 

I’ve owned and used a few cameras for bird photography over the years, from DSLR to mirrorless, as well as some great superzoom point and shoots, and I’ve loved all of them.

The Winner of The Best Birding Camera Overall: Sony A1

Best DSLR Birding Camera: Nikon D500

Best Superzoom Camera For Birding: Nikon Coolpix P1000

Best Budget Superzoom Camera For Birding: Canon SX540 HS

Check out some of the photos I took with my SX540 at La Isla Escondida Nature Reserve and Birding Lodge in Putumayo, Colombia:

Best Budget Mirrorless Birding Camera: Sony Alpha a6000

What Went Into My Selection Process for the Best Birding Cameras List

I’ve been birding and capturing photos of birds since I was a little kid, and I’ve been to a lot of birding destinations and used a lot of cameras.

I’m not a world-famous photographer or anything, but I think I take pretty good shots, and I know what I like in a birding camera. 

Many of my friends are birders and wildlife guides, and I myself have worked on and off as a wildlife guide in places like Thailand, Borneo and Colombia.

I’ve been around and learned from serious birders and wildlife enthusiasts, and I know what kind of camera setup you need if you want to take respectable shots of birds and wildlife more generally.

The Differences Between Bird and Wildlife Photography and Other Niches

Anyone who spends a lot of time photographing (or trying to) birds will probably agree that there are a few important distinctions between bird photography and other photography styles. 

Birders have to know how to make on-the-fly adjustments to their camera settings in ways that a lot of other photographers (e.g., landscape photographers) don’t have to.

The ideal settings when you’re birding can change from moment to moment. Birds move quickly and erratically from well-lit to shady spots, clouds can suddenly roll in or open up and trying to shoot primary forest species means you are stuck working with low light. 

Bird photography also demands a faster shutter speed. Whether you’re trying to capture birds in flight, birds hopping branch to branch in fruiting trees or skittish birds constantly scanning their surroundings for predators, shutter speeds of 1/1000th of a second or higher are best for photographing birds. 

That said, you still need to ensure your shutter speed is balanced with your ISO and aperture settings so that you are allowing enough light in to effectively capture your subject. 

Lastly, a birder needs to be good at tracking birds through a viewfinder. Birds are a flurry of movement and rarely stay in the same spot or same position for a long time. To take good shots of birds, birders have to hone their viewfinder tracking skills.

What Qualities Make For a Good Birding Camera?

The best camera for bird photography, whether we are referring to the best DSLR, superzoom (aka bridge camera) or best mirrorless camera, all have certain things in common. 

Weight

Taking good photos of birds requires taking a lot of photos, even with the best birding camera. It also means taking photos while heavily zoomed in, which requires a steady hand if you want to take clear shots.

What this means is that weight is a factor in a birding camera. You don’t want something so heavy that it’s a burden to shoot with. 

Autofocus System (AF), AF + Tracking and AF Points

The Speed and Accuracy of the Autofocus

Because birds are so erratic and unpredictable, the best cameras for bird photography have fast focus tracking–especially if the goal is photographing birds in flight. 

The best birding cameras–a modern high-end full frame mirrorless camera like the Sony A1–are going to have really good autofocus systems and deliver quality images.

Because this is a sophisticated piece of technology with a second-to-none autofocus system, it’s expensive, and not all cameras (anywhere or on this list) are going to have it. 

If you are looking to take photos of birds in flight, there really is no substitute for a good AF tracking system.

Animal Eye-tracking

The best birding cameras (again, like the new generation Sony Mirrorless cameras) also incorporate what is called bird/animal eye-tracking.

There aren’t too many cameras that have it, and you don’t need it to take great shots of your feathered friends, but the following birding cameras do:

• Canon R5 and R6,
• Olympus OM-D E-M1X,
• Sony A1, A9, A7R III and A7,
• Nikon Z5 and 6

For that reason, these cameras are preferred by serious birders and professional wildlife photographers. 

Autofocus system: quantity and type of autofocus points

The greater the number of focus points on a sensor, the easier it is to focus on birds in flight. 

This assumes you’ve got a somewhat neutral background to shoot against and have activated all your focus points. 

Frames Per Second (FPS) and Continuous Shooting

For birding, you are going to want a camera that shoots at least 7fps to adequately capture action shots.

Anything less and you can still take good photos of birds that have decided to sit still for a moment, but you will have a hard time capturing movement. 

It makes sense since the greater the number of shots you can fire off in a second, the higher your odds of capturing that perfect pose or movement.

Your Camera Body: Bridge Cameras, DSLRs, and Mirrorless Birding Cameras

Throughout this guide, I discussed a few different types of cameras for bird photography. They are: 

• Mirrorless Cameras
• Superzoom (or bridge camera) Cameras
• DSLR Cameras

A mirrorless, interchangeable lens camera is similar to a DSLR but tends to be lighter, more compact, have faster shutter speeds because of more simple internal mechanics, and can take photos silently (ideal for a birding camera). 

A DSLR camera was the go-to birding camera for professional bird photographers for years, up to the advent of the more sophisticated mirrorless cameras now preferred. DSLRs use a mirror to reflect the image from the lens into the viewfinder, which allows you to see what the image really looks like, as opposed to a digitized version. 

A superzoom, or bridge camera, combines the high-power telephoto zoom capability of your DSLR with the simplicity of a digital point-and-shoot with integrated body lens designs.

They are very easy to use and tend to be good options for beginners who either aren’t interested in learning the manual controls of a DSLR or mirrorless setup or who are looking for something less expensive.

And, while not the professional camera of choice, and not the best cameras for bird watching, you often find them as backups in the kits of a lot of wildlife lovers. This plus a pro level camera is a common gear combination. 

Lens Considerations and Image Quality

All of the birding cameras that I covered in this guide include just the camera body. In the case of the point-and-shoot superzoom/bridge cameras, you don’t need a zoom lens because the cameras already have zoom built in. 

In the case of DSLR and mirrorless cameras, the lens is one of, if not the most important part of your camera setup. To take photos of birds, you need a zoom lens that allows you to get up close to your subjects and you want something that has enough zoom, is made of good glass and is durable. 

A variable focal length lens with a max focal length in the range of 400-600mm is the most popular lens type for birding.

They give you 8x magnification at 400mm and 12x magnification at 600 when you use a full-frame sensor camera.

Bird Photography Tips: In-Situ and In-Flight 

Capturing birds, and especially photographing wild birds, is different from most other animals because birds have freedom of movement that most other animals don’t. To take good shots of birds, keep the following in mind: 

• Patience is the most important asset for birders. You can have the best birding camera on the market, but if you aren’t willing to wait for the right shot, you’re going to end up with a card full of duds. 
• Use continuous shooting mode. Part of the joy of birding and bird photography is watching these animals perform amazing acrobatic and agility feats in the air. Continuous shooting takes a series of quality images and lets you choose the best one. It’s more work curating, but you almost always end up with more keepers this way.
• Fast shutter speeds are best. In addition to using settings like continuous shooting, a fast shutter speed of at least 1/1000 will help you capture birds better. 
• Don’t be afraid to shoot birds in direct sunlight. We tend to avoid shooting portraits of people in direct sunlight because they look washed out, but bird plumage often needs direct sunlight to really show off its brilliance because of the way they reflect sunlight. 
• The golden rule of bird photography is to know your subject. You will almost always take better photographs of birds if you know about their habits. These include where they are found, where in the tree they are active (e.g., canopy), and what they eat. In the Americas, savvy birders often look for the ants that the birds use to find prey.
• Focus on the eye. Having any subject’s eyes in focus is always better for image quality, and birds are no different. The Sony A1’s ability eye-focus special feature is especially nice for this.

Thoughts on Using Playback

Trying to photograph birds in their natural habitat, even with a bird feeder camera positioned just right, is tough, especially in low light.

Perhaps nothing splits the bird photography niche or professional photographers like the concept of playback. 

I hear a lot of different opinions on “playback” or using audio recordings of bird calls in the field when it comes to bird photography.

I’ve heard anecdotes claiming that the extent to which “baiting” birds with song playback is harmful varies from species to species. 

My own view is that, if done sparingly by bird photographers, it likely doens’t have significant effects at the population level.

It can, and often is abused, however. A 2019 article from the Conservation authority Mongabay details how the overuse of playback has meant serious behavioural disturbances for a lot of species. 

Unscrupulous birding guides overusing playback who don’t care about the animals and just want that fat tip from their customers at the end of an expedition are definitely an issue in the international birding community

I think a lot of birders may not realize the effects that playback can have on the animals they love so much.

Great Free Birding Resources

While any serious birder no doubt has a bird guide for every region they’ve ever been to or are planning on visiting, there are a lot of great free birding resources out there to make the hobby more accessible and enjoyable. 

The Cornell University Lab’s BirdNET

The Cornell University Lab’s BirdNET Sound ID App has to be one of the best birding free birding resources ever produced. Simply record the sound on your phone, and the BirdNET database will tell you the species. 

Google Lens

Google Lens is a fantastic free Google application that IDs species based on an image. You can take a photo of literally anything–a plant, insect, bird, fish, snake, whatever–and the app, although not with 100% accuracy, will tell you the species you’re looking at, and usually, at the very least, the genus. 

iNaturalist

iNaturalist. Any serious birder (or wildlife enthusiast of any kind) worth their salt will know what iNaturalist is.

For those that don’t, it’s a joint project between the California Academy of Science and National Geographic that allows scientists and citizen scientists alike to record species observations around the world, complete with coordinates, time, date and a range of other environmental factors.

This is a great resource for birders who are trying to target specific species because you can see where they have been recently observed. 

Fieldguides.fieldmuseum.org

Fieldguides.fieldmuseum.org is a fairly recent user-generated field guide database that focuses on specific locations within countries and regions.

The guide selection is very conveniently broken down into continent and country, and they cover everything from plants and fungi to birds, reptiles and mammals. 

They are often put together by local researchers from local universities, and they provide free, albeit incomplete, samplings of various animal groups from specific locations. Here is a screenshot of part of a “Birds of the El Cauduceo Nature Reserve in San Martin, Meta, Colombia”:

Why Investing in Good Quality Birding Camera Makes Sense 

Admiring birds, and bird photography, are much richer experiences when you are able to get up close to them. To do this you need a good camera for bird photography (the body), telephoto lenses and a lot of patience. 

The behaviour, intelligence, striking beauty, and physical prowess of birds are what draw so many people into their worlds. 

In order to truly appreciate one of nature’s most spectacular creatures in all of their glory, you need to spend a bit (or, depending on how far you want to take it, a lot) of money in order to capture stunning images and memories these often reclusive, skittish animals. 

I hope the above list, whether you opt for a cheaper superzoom point and shoot or a state-of-the-art mirrorless, helps you choose the best birding camera for your experience, budget, needs and passion level so that you can better pursue one of life’s great joys: birdwatching.

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