Learning to Shoot Birds in Flight
The flight photos did not happen overnight; they were the result of fiddling with settings in my Canon 7D Mark II DSLR and many hours of practice daily. I would dump so many in the beginning and would be happy even if I got just one photo.
I started to use all 65 focus points in my camera with the focus tracking to help me learn to catch them and their movements. It almost kind of sounds like it would be made to be easy but it was not at all. The moving points did not always grab them and I still had to move and follow them and learn their flight behavior.
I started by trying to track them as they grabbed the peanut from the ground. Since I was in control of the peanuts and only throwing one at a time, more than one bird would go after the peanut so not every shot was a blue jay with a peanut in the mouth.