Cardinal and Snowflake

This Northern Cardinal was in the Riverwood Conservancy near Toronto last week. Many of you have already posted images of this species. I can't resist adding mine to the collection. So, here goes.

If you look closely you can see a single snowflake on the back of the bird. Subsequent images show many more snowflakes but this pose never returned. Also, it looks as though one claw is broken. On close inspection my conclusion is that it just looks that way because the tip is buried in the wood.

On previous postings I noticed some discussion about how red should be a cardinal. Apparently the red color originates from the bird ingesting carotenoid pigment. So redness varies. Also, female cardinals prefer males who are more red. Studies have shown that the more red the male the better he is at finding food for offspring.

For this particular image the red color was fine in Lightroom in the ProPhoto RGB color space. However, when I converted to sRGB to obtain the jpeg the red became oversaturated and I had to lower the saturation on the breast a little for the posted images.

All comments very welcome.

1D Mark IV, EF400 mm f/5.6L +1.4xTC, 580EXII, hand held: ISO 800, 1/1000 s, f/8.0, 0 EV, 13.0 MP after cropping; NR, exposure adjustment, sharpening, some desaturation as mentioned above.