A big welcome to the Avian board. It is a good place to learn!
You have got to love those feet! The light is a bit harsh, have you tried a reverse S curve to tone down the contrast a bit? I might also reduce the overall exposure about 1/3 of a stop and see how it looks. The crop is pretty tight, but looking at your stats, you must have been in pretty close. If you have it, I would try a bit more to the right side. When I have a zoom on, I try to take advantage of it, and shoot several different framings of the image. My natural tendency is to go too tight, and I often wish I had a bit more room later. The newer cameras are good enough that you don't need to be ultra tight on framing to maintain image quality.
I had a minute to try a couple of my suggestions. The repost includes -1/4 stop exposure, modest adjustment with the recovery slider in ACR, burned in the leaves left lower corner a bit, and darkened the pupil just a bit to make it more distinct. You can do a much better job on the RAW file, but hope this gives you some options.
Thanks Randy. I use DPP to convert but am a relative beginner at PP (only shooting RAW for a little over a year). I've just started using PSE and don't use PS so some of this is beyond me. I didn't crop the image at all so no more room. This image has the best HA out of the shots I took that day. I do have one that I left wider, maybe I'll play with the one and see if I can come up with something. Thanks again,
Hi Rachel, welcome to the Avian forum! Randy has offered some good advice. I will only add that you could have opened up to get the BG more OOF (especially the top part). The face and egg are on the same plane of focus so you still would have had both of these in focus by opening up.