Well, I would call it spray and cherry pick. But in essence yes.
I am old enough to remember when a 5 frame motor drive was a rarity and many of us spent most of our time shooting on roll film. If you need to capture twice the frame rate of an MGM blockbuster just to get a usable shot then I feel this is not the camera for you ..... not because it cant do the job, but because it needs someone that can work with it .
I remember shooting air to air over Holland in January with the Dutch Police. We flew from the UK and had to wait 2 days for clear air. The day we shot was rather chilly and there were two of us shooting stills in the bubble chopper. I produced a Mamiya RB67 with suitable lens and the other younger guy the latest Nikon. On arrival at the shooting spot we positioned relevant to the fixed wing we were shooting and I offered the Nikon guy first crack . He smiled at my Mamiya and its single frame battery-less bulk and formed up at the open door. He fired a couple of bursts and then stopped. I waited for him to sit down and took position . The sound of my film cocking lever and wind on marking each shot I took till the roll of 10 was done. As I reloaded I said to him he should get a few more and he declined and sat nursing his Nikon. Seems the January air at several hundred feet up had caused his camera battery to chill to the point of stopping and he had to wait for it to warm. I moved back to the door and having quickly reloaded, carried on shooting.
I somehow managed to fill car, plane, and boat magazines with images of fast moving subjects without the aid of a motor drive, and strangely managed to cover cricket too.
It seems there is an idea today that unless you have 30fps with pre capture, you cant do professional work , and I think it is a terrible inditement of the photographers ability.
The jpeg at the top is shot with manual shutter , and is from a burst of 3 frames shot while playing with the GF 250mm f4 shot at 1/350 s f5.6 . The car was doing around the speed limit for the road which is 60 MPH, a bit faster than most animals. I am sure firing two or three frames every now and then on manual shutter wont kill the camera before it is time to update it . Technology tends to retire bodies way before they die.
What I argue about is, that shooting living subjects in an unscripted context (that includes animals, but also humans, especially small ones), you often can't plan a shot like on a race track. On the latter you know, that these cars will come around that curve at about that speed and then go this way. Than you can select your viewing point, choose you setting and just click the shutter and the right moment. And next round, you have another opportunity.
Nature doesn't work that way. If you found wild animals (difficult enough), you don't know, what they do next, you don't know when and so on. And in case of mammals your location is strongly depend on the direction of wind and your own camouflage. That's simply a different kind of stuff. Great scenes come and go and you're task is to grab it unnoticed. (Also the variations of human expressions in/on(?) a face within two seconds can be really astonishing. If you have two persons talking / arguing with each other, it's not so easy to capture a pleasing image of those with just 5 fps. Having 15 fps simply increases the cherries you find on your card.)
Regarding mechanical shutter for wild life: I did that kind of stuff a decade ago and choose an Olympus E-1 for it. It is really rugged and rather silent. Back then with an adapter medium format lens. Often laying in the grass or in bushes, what wasn't a help regarding image quality.
And even that rather quiet shutter sound was often too loud, so you get detected and gone was the opportunity. And foxes are really not the shyest of wild deer. So from that perspective I would argue that really long telephoto lenses, silent shutter and high fps increase your hit rate measured in good images per week.
A young fox noticing the photographer. Shortly after this, he and his family was on the run.
