Surprise surprise

Beautiful capture.  Love the rock/flower foreground.  The biggest distraction for me is the line of the sky / ocean.  I'd either crop off the sky, or fill in the sky with ocean

Beautiful image David, the flowers are great!  I would crop off the top sky, even though that clearly shows you are looking at an ocean or at least large body of water. 

Superb view of the pheasant, David.  I'm a bit perplexed by the foreground.  To my eye, the foreground flowers look closer to being in focus than the out of focus rock which appears to be between them and the nice crisp pheasant.  Was this a composite image or is it some kind of optical illusion thats getting me?

Wow, great detail and colors in the pheasant, nice color throughout, and I agree with the suggestions to cut the sky/line.  You might want to crop a bit off of both the right side behind the pheasant, leaving just one of the flower stalks along with cropping the sky to push the main attraction a bit more off center as well.

Many thanks for your observations, comments and suggestions. The original set-up presented a gamut of issues. For this kind of static shot I would normally not have used these camera settings that were more appropriate to dynamic shots of a fulmar that I will post later. The focal point for this frame is the bird’s head rather than less sharp plumage situated on the bird’s back. The resulting shallow DOF imposed by using  f/8, set the flowers out of focus while still remaining recognizable. Yes, I often use a composite to force an issue; this being no exception. I also scaled left, right and bottom portions individually to drag the flowers into the 27.8 x 21.6 format. Portions of rock appear to be perplexingly out of focus because of small amounts of intervening foliage close to the lens. Gaussian Blur was applied to unsightly dead foliage in the immediate foreground. David  
 

Lovely pheasant well posed on a beautiful setting,but I second Keith about the bg....otherwise an excellent image.

David

What an unusual photo of a pheasant!  Lovely color and detail.  I really like it.  I do agree re the background elimination of the sky but that is a very small "nit".

Nice. Lovely colors in this, and I like the foliage, too.  I do agree with Keith about the sky line; it is a bit distracting for me.  Nice pose by the Pheasant, too!

The foreground and BG are superb.
Very nice shot.
D&L

This shot is definitely not a composite but in this instance, the focal point is on
feathers that are situated at the base of the bird’s back – thus the bird’s head is less than sharp. Regarding the composition, inclusion of the horizon is a contentious issue, but for me, the site also has less obvious historic implications; the bird is standing on the cliff edge a few metres from a fort that dates back to the Napoleonic wars. The coast of France is but few km. on the other side of the horizon! David

I like this one, others have said about the top part but IMO it gives location and when looking at the image you just know its the sea!

I wasn't to sure about the subject being in the middle, but it seems to works(because of the BG and the shape of the rock!)

Well done