I presume you are talking about a VIDEO camera? We had a Panasonic with 24 times optical zoom. Often, we didn't really need that large a zoom. More important is USING the noise reduction tool to minimize wind noise. Often, we were VERY close to animals. When you look at my regular pictures, most of them were taken with a 75 to 300 zoom lens, often NOT zoomed out all the way. We were often within 10 feet of cats, 20 feet of elephants, further away with some prey animals, like zebra, etc..
