I recently treated myself to a second hand Canon EF 70-300mm which I'm delighted with. To get an idea of its magnification factor in the old money you multiply by 1.6 then divide by 50, so mine is 500/50 which is 10x optical magnification. There's not many pics you can't take with that. I bought it from mbpphotographic.co.uk and it cost a bit over £200 but was worth every penny in my opinion.
Remember with a decent resolution digital camera you can also selectively crop the image in graphics software and still get a good shot, and it will be sharper if you shoot in RAW format rather than .jpeg.
As for earnest people with expensive ultra-sized lenses, here's a couple I saw trying to spot puffins on Skomer:
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