Canon R 5 C - video set up - please help

I'm not a wildlife expert I'm an action/sport videographer but I'm really interested in African's wildlife, but not much in birds so I cannot comment on birds AF.
Also, African's mammals are quite bigger so it may not be fully applicable to you.

AF is not perfect and wildlife being in a complex environment it makes it even more challenging. Expecting that AF always works is not realistic with the state of the art today. In fact, most wildlife docs are all done in manual focus, but it is challenging, need follow focus, big screen or even a focus puller.
I used both R5 and R5c and R5 offers more options, but I don't find it more reliable with AF, so I used 80% R5c mostly in 8k 50fps. I used 70% AF and 30% manual focus.
One thing is that it seems that R5c is focusing a bit outside the AF area, so the AF square is smaller than what it is in reality. So, the medium size area is not that useful, and it could be that the smaller is sometime still too big. In this case object tracking is better.

- AF is mostly on max response and max speed, but sometimes I tweak it depending on the situation.
- When lateral tracking on foot or on a vehicle the best is the whole area AF for shallow dof or using manual focus stopped down depending on the environment.
- When animals are walking at you, whole area with object tracking, sometimes you need to bump by reselecting the object (face), peaking helps a lot detecting if it is losing it or not.
- High-speed animal moving like chasing, small area AF
- Key is to really start the AF on the animal and bump it if needed. If the initial AF is not good the tracking will be bad or not at all. Initial AF in video mode both for the R5 and R5c is much much slower than on photo mode. Sometimes I help by turning the focus ring to help acquiring the focus at the beginning.

Here some examples, I'm far from finishing editing and no grading yet so I can only share some quick screen grab from R5c videos all at 180° angle.

EF 24-70 at 2.8 on Gimbal whole area

Whole area AF RF 70-200 at 2.8 on gimbal tracking

Still keeping focus even with all the branches

And still in focus after the termitarium

tracking from a vehicle, wanted to secure the shoot, so manual AF, RF 70-200 F11 on Gimbal.

tracking from a vehicle manual AF RF 70-200 F11 on Gimbal

RF 400 at 2.8 whole area + object tracking by selectin the face, sometimes you need to bump it a bit with the touch screen, same for the R5 (even if it has animal tracking it still loses it from times to times and sometimes it makes no sense as it tends to lose it when imo is easier)

RF 400 at 2.8, whole area + object tracking

RF 100-500 at 7.1 100fps small area AF

RF 100-500 at 7.1 100fps small area AF

Hope it helps