I like the extremely low angle in this image and the blanace between the out of focus areas and the sharp ones. Compoition works very fine for me, with the bird placed at the left and a lot of empty room at the right. The eye is just fantastic in terms of sharpness and contact. I would crop a bit a the top of the image and it seems to me that colors are a bit on the warm side of the spectrum.
Great use of deep of field, by the way
Regarding bean bags... you can go wrong with them, they are really cheap (even you can made one by yourself) and provide a superb support for heavy lenses. You can have a lot of positive feedback here from people who uses them but you can try by yourself :-)
Love the warmness of the light here as it blends well with the overall look of the image. Head turn is great but I wish you were slightly at higher angle so we could see the whole tail. I agree with a little desaturating but not much. Congrats
I really like the nice low angle. Perhaps a bean bag would have been just the thing to get the camera a tad higher and more or all of the tail. I really like the dof. Nice look back pose. Dave