Despite the occasional harsh comments, I find this to be a productive line of discussion. Many thanks to all participants.
Different people find differing values in their photo strategies. That is healthy.
By shooting lots of photos of birds in action, I find important subtle differences between the individual images of high speed bursts, so I am reluctant to toss them out. When shooting landscapes or people at a party, I shoot fewer, but do take "a few extras". I tend to cull those as soon as I get home, tossing those with composition or focus problems. In the case of birds, I rely heavily on serendipity - a bird that suddenly decides to take off, or an egret catching a fish, or an unexpected golden light illuminating a wing of a tern near sunset. One rule doesn't cover all situations.

As I reflect on my film usage when kayaking and backpacking in my misspent middle age, I typically would take about 2 rolls of 35 mm- 36 exposure for each anticipated day in the wilderness. Thus, for a 7 day backpack, I carried about 14-16 rolls of color film. Mostly print film, occasional rolls of slide film. Developing cost for printing came out to about $15-20 per roll. Mostly shot for sweet memories, so iin that sense they were almost all "keepers". On a trip to China in the late 1970's shortly after the "opening of China", I was there for a month and shot more than 30-40 rolls of film. That was about 1,400 exposures. Almost all of it was Kodachrome. Used every roll of film in my luggage. My mindset was that the trip was costing the government so much money, that I could afford to pay my share in film.
If a similar occasion arose now, I would be going digital. On a backpacking trip with my then new Mirrorless about 6 years ago, I shot about 500 pictures in 7 days. I kept almost all the photos. Thanks to recently learning Lightroom, many of the pix were reconsidered and found surprisingly usable, and I made a number of 20x30 prints from my APS-C SONY files. It was often a simple matter of adjusting the White Balance, brightness of highlights, shadows, white and black, and minor adjustments to HSL values. I realized that I was now able to do the things I might have wished to do in a darkroom with B&W, but otherwise lacked the darkroom skills to do with color images. That made me a convert to the amazing potential of digital imaging for outdoor photography.

I quite agree. If a photographer enjoys the darkroom work, then it is worth doing. As a research lab scientist, I have used a variety of cameras, film, size formats from 35 mm, 2.5x4 inch to 8x10 inch over more than 50 years of my career. During one period of less than a year I probably shot a few thousand 8x10. The darkroom work was exhausting, standing up for many hours at a time, printing and reprinting a single negative until I got a satisfactory result for publication in books. Pictures pushed the limits of high resolution macrophotography. When I had my initial products with digital, I was able to produce acceptable quality prints within a few minutes, rather than multiple wet prints over many hours. Digital photography allowed me to move from B&W to color, providing far more informative and attractive results. But for portraits, I think of the drama of a B&W portrait by Karsh, or a photo of whalers at work in the ocean by Fritz Gore, or a landscape of the Tetons by Ansel Adams.

But it all depends upon your goal and purpose. If the process of watching the magic of a print emerging after 60 seconds in a tray is appealing, then go for it! One of my sons loves to work with water color, painting local scenes that reflect his artistic skills. In my case, my goal was producing a technically notable high resolution photo. My son's goals are far more centered on setting, mood, color contrasts and composition. He takes quite acceptable photos when using my fancy cameras, but I cherish his ability to convey content and mood with the sparsest of movements of his brush. Yes, I can take 1,000 photos in the time it takes him to open his pad and lay out his paints, and each painting reflects far more forethought - but I am more likely to hang his paintings on the wall than any of the hundreds of photos I have shot in the same time. Now, in retirement, I love to visually optimize pictures of birds in flight to visually dissect wing position, spread, changes with different instants of time as they swoop down, take off, land,... Digital photography allows me to experiment with the photographic process in ways that were previously nearly impossible. But for landscapes, I loved my 4x5 cameras. So much nicer than squinting through those narrow angle viewfinders. But I never fully mastered planning a landscape looking at an upside-down image on my ground glass screen. Composition has its own set of rules and the medium is part of the esthetics.

I recall reading that the estimated life expectancy for the higher end cameras was about 500,000 exposures for mechanical shutters. As we shift to ever more cameras with electronic shutters, I think that there is no limit to the number of shutter exposures during the lifetime of the newer cameras. When shooting bursts of 10 frames/second of birds in flight, I use exclusively electronic shutter mode. Strategies for shooting BIrds in Flight has changed dramatically with the advent of digital vs. film. I may shoot 250-500 pictures a day, shooting about 2-4 days a week. It may (with luck) give me 5-10 keepers per day, though sometimes one or even none. (If I shot that many pictures on film in a single day, which I never did, I would have been bankrupted by the cost of film and developing/printing!) If I used mechanical shutter mode, it would be easy to shoot 50,000 pictures a year and run down my camera's life expectancy.
Electronic shutters also eliminate a noise that may scare off birds. The only time that I use mechanical shutter mode is when shooting with flash. I understand that the newest cameras may be able to use electronic shutters with flash.

Wow! Great photos.

Some great shots of ospreys! Comments are pretty funny.
Harvey

If you go to Menu 1, page 10, item 1, you may find the Exposure Step grayed out. If so, that is likely to be due to the fact that your manual knob for changing the EV value is at a value other than 0. Set it to 0, and you will then be able to change the Exposure Step from 0.3 to 0.5. Play with each of these values, and you will find that it gives you differing Shutter values.

Lovely shots. Exposure looks spot on! White balance on hawk might be shifted slightly to red, and reduce blue saturation a tad?

Excellent start.

What kind of camera are you using? I ask as it may determine the possible range of optimal settings of your ISO vs. noise level. Try setting your Auto-ISO to a range of 100 to 3200. If white bird, as suggested, set to -0.7 or lower.
Save in RAW to give greatest possibility of adjusting in post-processing.
Manual Mode
Shutter speed at least 1/2000
Aperture f 8.0
Experiment with different ISO. Depends upon the vintage and type of camera. Try to find an acceptable range of high ISO and "noise" in the image. Don't be afraid to push the ISO. It is the only way you will learn the limits of your camera.

Nicely done!

Magnificent set of photos. Spot on!

You are most welcome. Many thanks for the kind words.
HJK

Hi tcthome,
Glad you enjoyed the photo.
Many thanks for the comments.
THe only post-processing was minor adjustment to exposure and slight HSL.
Harvey

Hi UTMike,
Many thanks for the suggestion. I will give a try.
Harvey

Good eyes! In the process of trying to line up the two photos, I inadvertently changed the brightness and HSL values.
Many thanks for your helpful comments. I agree with your interpretation. The enhancement process does provide a bit sharper image, and is preferable to the results produced by using the Sharpening tool in LR. The sharpening tool often produces an artificial diffraction -like effect with fringes on sharp borders. For critical macro shots, I would probably prefer to use a proper Macro lens, such as the Sigma 105mm Macro. Considering that it was done with a relatively inexpensive APS-C lens, the results were OK. But other than telling users that it employs AI software, the Adobe staff don't inform us what the algorithm is actually doing (and I'm not sure I would undestand it, even if they did tell me!). The Super Resolution tool is included at no extra cost in the routine updates to LightRoom.