[eeyore]

Its very difficult to give an ideal camera setting because every situation is different.

however for photographing small birds - which tend to flit arround quite a bit , I would suggest that you need to keep the shutter speed up as much as possible or you will wind up with a lot of motion blur. - I'd suggest that you aim for 1/250th or faster (these are fractions of a second so the larger the bottom number the faster the speed)

with a lot of bird photography it is also a good idea to blur the background by having a relatively small depth of field (abreviated to dof) - the dof is the portion of the photo which will be in focus (assuming you dont have camera wobble or subject movement). This is controlled largely by the apperture (yes experienced people i know there are other factors but i'm trying to keep this simple for a beginer) - the wider the apperture (ie the hole the light gets through to the sensor) the smaller the dof - the apperture is meassured in f numbers (e.g from 5.6 to f11) in this case the smaller the number the wider the apperture and they double each time (ie f5.6 is twice as wide as f8 etc) so for small bird photography i would set either f5.6 or f8.

The apperture also has a relation with the shutter speed as the wider the apperture is the more light gets in during exposure and thus the faster the shutter speed can be for a given exposure. Most cameras have an AV (apperture priority) mode where you set the apperture and the camera sets the shutter speed, TV (shutter priority) where you pick the speed and the camera selects the coresponding apperture, a mannual mode (M) where you pick both advised by the camera meter - and a range of scene modes where the camera picks both. My advice would be to put the camera in AV and select f5.6.

Another important number is the ISO this ranges from 100- 1600 on most cameras (though some have less) this controls the sensitivity of the sensor , the higher the number the more sensitive and thus the faster the available shutter speed for a given aperture and light. However before you rush to set 1600 there is a drawback.

the higher the ISo the more noise (ie wrongly coloured pixeks in the dark areas) you get - I would tend to select iSO400 unless you are in very dark conditions where it might be worth going up to 800.

CW average metering decides the exposure based on the amount of light in the whole frame - though it is weighted towards the center (CW=centre weighted) , this is generally good but can be fooled if you have a lot of very light or dark in the photo (as when photographing a bird in the snow) Spot metering works out the exposure based on a much smaller area (the circle in the middle of the view finder on most cameras - though some pro spec DSLRs can do it on any focusing point) which is good for tricky situations but you do have to make sure that the spot is on the subject.

One other thing I'd mention would be what sort of file you have selected - you will have a range of jpegs plus RAW to chose from. As a beginer i'd advise you to go to the largest jpeg available (normally known as jpeg large or jpeg fine), when you get more experienced you might prefer to swap to raw (we have whole threads on jpeg vs raw so i'm not going into this now).

I hope this helps and look forward to seeing the results - feel free to pm me if theres anything here you'd like clarified.

good luck and have fun.