There are several good telephoto lenses (the kind you want to buy) available for your cameras. Since your current lens can cover distances to 80mm, you should look for one with a focal length of at least that. Bigger numbers indicate the ability to handle longer distances. A 160mm lens will focus to twice the distance your current lens will. A 240mm lens will focus to three times the distance. However, as this focal length increases, three things will happen to the lens: it will get more expensive; generally larger and heavier; and less able to handle lower levels of light. Expensive is expensive; there is not much you can do with that besides buy a used lens or a third-party lens (in your case, a lens by anyone other than Canon). The inability to handle lower levels of light can be compensated for several ways. You could keep the camera lens open longer to admit more light -- but that can cause blurring if you're shooting a moving subject or holding the camera without a tripod. You could use flash, though the flash that comes on the camera likely won't have enough power to light something far away, so you might have to buy a flash unit. You could spend more money :-) and get a telephoto lens that has a wider maximum aperture. These are sometimes dramatically bigger and heavier than less-capable lenses. Or you could buy an "IS" (Image Stabilization) lens; the lens largely eliminating blur caused by handholding. Neat feature; not cheap. If you choose to buy a used lens, it's best to buy one in person at a place that sells used photographic equipment and will give you at least a little warranty. Bring your digital so you can see some results right away. Since Canon is a popular brand, if you live near an urban area you shouldn't have trouble finding a good lens. If you buy a third-party lens, stick with better-known brands (Tamron and Tokina come to mind, but try to avoid their very cheapest lenses). A good third-party lens will have a metal lens mount and operate smoothly and quietly. You also will have to make sure it works with your particular Canon camera model. Sometimes third-party lenses don't work well with a given manufacturer's camera, so you may lose some automatic features or exposure information. That's a lot to digest at once, I'm sure. There also are several Web sites which discuss lenses for Canons -- but be warned that there is just a firehose of information out there because Canon is such a popular brand.

You are absolutely correct that learning how to manipulate the shutter speed and aperture to maintain the desired depth of field is the finer points of photography, but with the advent of auto focus and auto exposure controls that is rapidly becoming a lost art. Back in the mid 60's when I learned photography we all we had at best was manual focus and stop down match needle metering. Try shooting action shots at a football game when you have to manually focus and compute the exposure for each shot and you will rapidly find out the action is long gone before you even get a shot off. Add to that, we were working with fixed focal length prime lenses. The solution was to go to the sidelines at mid field (50yd line) and select a lens focal length that would give you closeups at mid field or at either end of the field, typically a 200mm. on the lens barrel you will see a center line that indicates the distance from the camera to the subject. On either side of that index you will see small lines that have an f-stop index number, one on each side of the center focus index. That is the depth of field scale index lines. The smaller the aperture the wider the distance between the index lines, and the greater the depth of field. Rather than focus the lens on a set point, rotate the lens until the infinity mark is on a depth of field index on one side and look at the corresponding depth of field mark on the opposite side to see what the closest focal point is. By example, a 200mm lens at f-16 has a maximum depth of field of 24' to infinity. A 300mm lens at f-16 would give you a depth of field range of 90' to infinity. The ISO or film speed index is equal to the shutter speed at noon daylight at the equator. As we move north or south of the equator the light falls off. On average, at noon in the USA the ISO number is equal to the correct shutter speed with the aperture set at f-11. We need a minimum shutter speed of 250 and f-16 is one f-stop slower than f-11, so we would use ISO 400 film (slightly less than one f-stop faster). With the modern digital cameras offering shutter speeds up to 1600 or 3200 it is much easier. Set the aperture at f-16 and set the ISO at 800 and you could shoot the whole game without making another setting on the camera.

One of the easier ways I've found to shop for electronics is to use Walmart's website. If you go there and select digital camera, you'll come up with around 485 results. Then narrow it down to 150-200 dollar range and that gets it down to about 75. Then if you select the 4 and 5 star rated cameras, the results go down to about 15 cameras. Looks like those are all in the 12 to 16 MP size and all are brand name cameras. Anyway, that's my lazy way of doing it and it doesn't cost anything to use their website. The SX130 mentioned above is one of those listed in my results.

Thank you, Forester. I did order a Rexing camera (the H2 model, $199 on amazon) and a Sandisk micro-SD card. I'll be doing the set-up this weekend; wish me luck. In my years here on this half-acre lot in a developer's plat in a fairly well-populated suburb, I have seen raccoons, a fox once, deer a few times, a coyote once, and one time I found a small opossum in late fall and took it to the rescue staff at our local Nature Center. The employee said it was probably from a second litter, and that a late litter plus that year's early winter means a low survival rate. That's why he was ailing. One summer night a few years ago, with the windows open, I heard a "kill" . The predator was growling ferociously and the prey was screaming/squealing pitifully, both were loud, it was awful and it seemed to go on forever. Hope to never hear that again!