I would go for the 100-400mm in your suggested list. But I would recomend the 400mm prime over the zoom for better IQ and extender performance. The zoom is amost useless for birds and a little more useful for wildlife, but still not very useful. IS is helpful but the AF is better on the 400mm prime. I find most of the time the subject is moving more than my minimum shutter speed at this focal length and IS is less important. All the image quality in the world is useless if it's not properly focused and in this case I think AF wins over IS. BIF is one form of bird photography that is not too hard to do if you have adequete AF and is a lot of fun to shoot.


But for serious bird and wildlife photography I would get a manual focus 500mm/600mm/800mm lens, they cost about the same aseither lens and they enter a new dimension of photography compared to shorter lenses. Not only do they have longer native focal lengths but with extenders they can get shots and perspectives of wild subjects that would be imposible with shorter lenses, in this case AF is useless because you can't get the shot in the first place without loss of AF anyway. Or taping the pins trick wil give you poor AF performace in lower light.


BTW, all my bird and wildlife shots are taken with aMinolta 600mm f/6.3 manual focus lens.


John.