Boat-tailed Grackle

I like the setting and your compostion. It looks like you tried to bring up the blacks in this and not much detail is showing. There is a halo around the whole bird and I get this when using too much of the shadow/highlight tool. The pose you captured is perfect for an id of this boat tail. Sharon

Thanks for your comments, Sharon. I actually did not use the Photoshop Shadow/Highlight tool. All I did was to sharpen it a bit. I tried a different sharpening method, which makes the halo somewhat less prominent. The bird is so dark that it is hard to bring out any detail. Perhaps I should have used a higher positive EV value.

I prefer the repost much better

I like the repost better too. This is a very difficult exposure with the dark bird and all that bright sky.

The capture and pose are very good, but you have some challenges. The crop cost you a lot of detail, but not much you can do about that. Even if the repost there's some post-processing defects. And I think you may have applied noise reduction a bit heavily.

Jim DeWitt, thanks for your comment. Actually I did not do any noise reduction on the image All I used was a free Photoshop Plugin by Rick Davis (oneclickWow) called "lab sharpening" which does not do any noise reduction. Attached image is the unenhanced version. I cropped the much large image, reduced the quality to keep it within the 200 KB requirement but did not do anything else with it.