The R5, at 45MP, is a fairly unforgiving unit as regards being used with poor technique or lens technology. I have the Rf 24-105L and 100-500L units and have used them to great effect with R5 and R6 bodies. On the R6, the RF24-240 worked well enough in the situation in which I used it - more static objects. I wanted to 'stress test' this lens on the R5 to see what the lens would, and would not handle.
So, I took myself to my local gannet colony, which is very busy with new birds arriving, pairing up, mating and nesting: it's too early for hatchlings yet. When arrived I was treated to a coast swathed in sea mist, and that was an easy shot for the lens to deal with.
So I began by photographing relatively static birds as they paired and nested.
For those sitting on an egg, the boredom of the whole thing is relieved by frequent preening - much like some humans under lockdown! This image is heavily cropped from the original, which was in landscape more and had the whole bird, furthermore, I had set the R5 to a 1.6x crop, so the equivalent FoV at 240mm was then equivalent to that of a 400mm on FF mode.
As a general-purpose walk around lens, it does not have the blazing speed of the RF-L units, so my keeper rate from the birds on the wing, moving fast and unpredictably, was not a high as the high-end ones, but still very respectable. That said, with the animal eye tracking and great focusing of the R-series bodies, it did a great job!
I deliberately chose this shot to see how the system would cope with a cluttered and almost identical background - and again, I think it did OK.
In summary: having the RF100-500L available, while the R5 with the 24-240 would not be my go-to combination for wildlife, it did get reasonable results, albeit with a higher attrition rate. Certainly for its zoom range, the lens does an awesome job. These images have all been significantly downsized and, in some cases, cropped to fit with the 5MP image limit.
