I use Tracking sparingly. I do use it for most of my perched bird work which then is 99% of the time switching into Bird Eye AF. Bird Eye AF comes on more readily in Tracking than non-tracking for whatever reason.
But for most of my BIF work I use non-Tracking Wide (sometimes Zone). For very erratic BIF you will see Tracking resort back to non-tracking (ie dancing squares) a lot of the time anyways. And as mentioned up thread, Tracking will sometimes grab a distraction and never let go. Non-tracking may bounce over to a distraction for a frame or two but then will re-acquire the moving subject. Tracking will often just lock on that distraction for the entire BIF sequence and you miss it all.
This past weekend the Violet-green swallows arrived back in town. Wide (non-tracking) did the trick as it always does for me....
Excellent shots! Love the expressions and that background is jaw-dropping!
It's interesting when it comes to tracking / non-tracking, I've had kind of the opposite experience. I started off using the a1 mostly in non-tracking and zone. It worked well, but when I switched to Zone Tracking for BIF, it seemed like I had a higher keeper rate (not by much though - it's close). I kind of feel like zone + tracking gives me the best of both - when tracking works, it's great, when it doesn't it acts like regular zone (which is rare - tracking usually takes over pretty quickly). And, as you say, it does seem like eye detection is slightly better with tracking. Still, it's not good for every BIF situation.
Also, I too use tracking with static birds - and many mammals - all the time as well. It really frees you up for composition and it almost always jumps right to the eye. I also like to use tracking when a bird is about to take off. I get tracking to stick to the bird and as long as I can successfully follow it, it's usually a success.
At any rate, I think it's a testimony to the camera - it works really well in many configurations. I think what works best can vary from shooter to shooter simply based on their field techniques and it's great that the camera can produce consistent results for so many.
Here are some examples. The first three are using Zone Tracking and the kingfisher was with non-tracking. It all seems to work
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And this was a slightly older shot using just Zone with eye detection on (non-tracking)
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