G'day Colin.
Nice pose, head angle and background.
Unfortunately it appears overexposed. If you shoot raw images, you may be able to recover some detail in the conversion.
For advice on this and your sharpening troubles, I can highly recommend Artie's Digital Basics as a great way to fast track your digital image optimisation skills.
Thanks Leo! Yes I shoot raw and that overexposed look (which I didn't recognise) is from my pp in trying to lift the bird out from the bg. I'll have a look at ADB.
Interesting bird. Agree with the exposure comment. I like the HA, but two things I might consider would be to clone/blend that brownish area in the LR in the BG and maybe clone out the vertical branch? Is this bird in the cuckoo or icterid family?