Leif,
I am pleased this has given a bit of inspiration to have a go.
As like me you will be on a first outing then hopefuly this from yesterday may be helpfull.
If you think of shore birds, then you need to think of how small they are, and with little cover on a beach how close you can get.
For the Ringed Plover at Titchwell I was behind and old WWII concrete job on the beach, and a couple of these came fairly close but not close enough. So even with 2x converter on, they are small in the frame. The crop shows the negative effect in terms of softening of using the converter if you have to crop to make up for lack of lens magnification.
At Hunstanton with lots of dog walkers life was a lot trickier. As the dogs were effectively flushing the Turnstones along the shoreline. I used that to my advantage by watching where they had been, and settling down and hoping that they would eventually duck back behind the dogs. I was really lucky here as they did, but the window of opportunity only lasted a few minutes before the arrival of another dog walker. For this I was using the 400mm without converter. The difference in image quality if you can get away without using a converter, provided you can get near enough, is quite noticeable, unless you can get near a frame filler.
For all my pics I used a monopod, as with only 400mm, needing to get close was going to be the priority. In the event in all cases a tripod would have been unusable without moving further back, either to levelish ground or staying back for fear of putting the birds to flight.
Don
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