They will move anyway 
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These are excellent. I’m a bird nerd and am trying to figure out what they were.
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Inventive. Did you use an nd filter? Never used one. But I’ve just ordered a cheap Chinese lens adapter with a drop in variable nd filter. I’ve read that variable nd filters aren’t great for stills but didn’t really want to buy the extra fixed nd drop ins before trying this kind of photography out.
Those are city birds but I don’t know their name, maybe ravens?
Yes, I used a 5-stop ND filter, which I think is quite good quality, as I did not notice any loss of sharpness for now. But I still had to close the aperture to the point where the dust in the front elements started to become too noticeable, so maybe I’ll also buy a 10 stop filter 
How does the variable ND works? Because I remember they use a combination of polarizing filters so you’ll get the disadvantages of 2 polarizing filters in series so maybe this is the cause of a drop in quality?
I used to have a variable ND filter that seemed to have two polarizing filters in series and I quickly returned it (I was looking for extreme ND filters and that was not suitable). On maximum setting it suffered the infamous cross effect. I’m not sure if all variable NDs do that, higher end ones might not. K&F Concept variable ND was said to be okay, but not sure.
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The variable nd comes with the adapter so is kind of “free”. There’s a proper review by cvp that shows only a very slight cross effect at the max setting. My main thought was that the dial doesn’t have specific stops marked so then I’m not sure how you do the necessary calculation to know the correct shutter speed other than by some trial and error. Maybe that’s fine, not sure
But do you really need to have the precise stops? Because you could rather fix the exposure time you need and then just tweak the filter until global exposure is good?
But otherwise you can put your camera in spot metering, and then set your camera settings until you have +0EV exposure, then you open by one stop your aperture keeping the other parameter constants (+1EV) and tweak your filter until it’s exposed back to +0EV (same scene, ideally homogenous surface). So then you can check were your filter is doing -1EV, etc.
But when I had to decide which filter to choose I finally ended up choosing the fixed ND filter because it’s not a polarizing filter, but also because it’s one parameter less to play with 
And the fixed amount of stops is not a problem because you can always compensate the other parameters to a certain extent.
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Yes, I think the second method would work. Just a bit fiddly. The first might be hampered when you need extremely long exposures requiring bulb or what have you. I think in-camera light meters won’t work with very low levels of light, from what I’ve read. Maybe 10 and 6 stop fixed filters would make sense, ideally.
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