Bird Photography with Manual Focus

Gah... manual focus isn't ideal for bird photography, especially when the birds are in flight. Three hours, and this is about as good as it got. And Digital ICE has its limitations, as you can see here by the dust spots all over this image :/

Unfortunately, a large-aperture lens just isn't in the cards in the short term, since that's a $7000+ investment. So for now, I'll just let the folks with the really big glass get the in-flight shos. :)