caught wild

I am excited that I was able to see some warblers and was able to get some shots, but the photos are far from perfect. I hope I can get some help/advices here. (I know photographing warblers is very hard).

1. Ideally I’d like the warblers to be 6 feet away from me, but I could never get as close to less than 20 feet. More than often, I heard the bird chirping, but could not even find them because they were so small and they were in the trees. I rarely got them close to 30 feet.
2. Those birds kept jumping around. They never stopped. I could hardly find them in the view finder of my camera. Getting a good focus was even harder. Waiting for a good pose of the birds could take millions of years.
3. The lighting was bad for most of time even in sunny days because they liked to stay in trees. The twigs and leaves could block the Sun entirely.

What is the solution?
1. Buy a blind and stay in it for hours? (Sometimes it is hard to find an open space to set up the blind because those birds like to stay in bushes)
2. Just stand there still for hours? (I stood there for about half hour without much luck but a lot of mosquitoes’ bites. I can suffer the pain, I can stand the scorching heat, but I am not brave (or stupid) enough to take too many bug’s bites because I am worried about West Nile virus.)
3. Again, buy better equipment. I know my 300D and 100-400mm is a very basic setup and I am willing to drop $10000 for 1D II and 500mm f4 lens if they are the must. However, for those places, I could not even setup a tripod easily and 500mm f4 is so heavy for handheld. Also, I am a guy that who enjoys pushing the limit of the gear. If there is any chance to get decent shots with my current gear, I’d like to stick with it. For me. Being able to walk around with my light setup is a great fun.

If you have any suggestions, drop your comments here (by click "comments" on this page) or send an email to huikh2r@yahoo.com

Thanks for all the inputs in advance,

Kai Hui