Interesting environment and nice head angle. The body appears very sharp.
It looks like you've blown the highlights in the head a bit, although if you were using RAW you can probably recover some of that. I also think it is a bit tight, you've cut off the virtual legs in the water so he appears a bit awkward. I'd like a little more room all around. The only other nit is the out of focus grass in the foreground. There is a tension between getting a clear foreground and the shooting angle. Your angle here is already a bit higher than I'd like, so there probably wasn't much you could do about the grass.
I hope these comments help! If this is a cropped file, I'd try playing around with some other crops.
Nice find, these herons are quite skittish around here. I agree with Samuel regarding angle, being tight in the frame and exposure. If it is a RAW file you could try the highlight recovery feature in ACR or one of the other programs. If it is not RAW then this is one of the perfect example why using RAW makes a lot of sense. :)
Given their skittishness where I live, I can appreciate any GBH image this close. I agree on the exposure, shooting RAW and leaving room for the virtual legs. The head seems soft in comparison to the rest of the body. I'd definitely bump up the ISO and in turn you could increase your shutter speed which would give you a better chance of getting the head sharp...especially if/you were moving. I don't know whether you used a tripod or not but that will also give stability. Sometimes shooting with a tripod is not convenient but I use it whenever I can. Also, you might list the lens that you were using as that can often give us even more information to work with.
Great Blue Heron
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