Yesterday I popped over to Hartsholme Park with Chris Bennett and we spend an hour or two practicing our wildlife photography.
If your after shooting subjects like birds in flight then you have to practice regularly. One the joys of digital photography is that you can spend a few hours on a Sunday at a local park and shoot a few hundred frames. Then review when you are at home and delete the mistakes. This is something that in the film days would cost you a lot of money and is one of the great advantages of digital, you can learn a lot from the instant feed back.