Awesome work, Steve! Like how you have taken this further, and looks like you are enjoying yourself. Very imaginative, creative, and love the sense of humor. BG looks great, and I know what you mean about an hour of cloning - I had to learn about making selections the hard way too!
Here is the second try with layers and selection, I still had to erase the halos but it was much cleaner. I used the background sky, then pasted the birds, then selected the sky and erased it, leaving some halos, then I went around and erased the halo and this is the result, if it posts. This image is cleaner than the first image posted on this thread