Nikon and Canon Photographers scooped up most of the wildlife awards.

Ab Latchin wrote:

Not really. It is a technology and light thing. For example Canon FF sensors set to stops higher iso will not raise shadows as well, and neither will a Sony.

So as I said, if your ff shooter is at f11 and ISO 1600, you will be at f5.6 and ISO 400. Both Sony and Canon do not have a full two stop noise advantage and will have noisier shadows. In Sony's favor they have a lot of high resolution bodies to claw back some of the noise.

Nikon is really the class leader here, but even they are not miles ahead of the 2 stop difference.

So, sure if the FF Camera uses a larger aperture and the same iso three is lots of advantage, if they use the same size aperture and a higher iso they don't, especially not a Canon.

The thing is if you are shooting birds in flight DOF is not a challenge even with long telephoto lenses on FF . Unless the bird is a pterodactyl . Thanks to the distances typically involved { hence why you are using long telephoto lenses} . Plus shooting birds is bloody hard in the daylight so I doubt many are doing it in the dark

If you can sneak up on the wee buggers you can then shoot with shorter focal lengths . People here tend to forget that before digital came along 35mm was considered a small deep DOF format relative to other systems . While 110 film was of course a low quality toy format

Then there is of course the huge MP count available on many FF cameras such as the 45mp D850 or 42mp A7RII/III. Which allows for significant cropping whilst still retaining a large file size if really needed .There is also a far lower penalty for pushing shadows on for example a BIF shot , where the far brighter background typically results in a somewhat underexposed bird unless you choose to blow out the sky.

Here is a 19.4mp crop from a D850 which gives you a 1.5x crop factor

Original frame:

1.5X 19.4 MP crop with 100% detail sample inserted