Techs are perfect. My be a tick harsh on whites but considering the light conditions you did an exceptional job.
Personally I prefer more attention to subjct with little bit of tighter crop some thing similar to this.
Wish he was flying parallel to sensor plane. I would have been an excellent image.
Little noisey so I ran some NR and cropped to how you mentioned, also took some off the back since I didn't have much room to work with in the front. Here is my redo of the image what do you guys think?
Cody, I don't usually mind a "habitat" image but there are a few things I think would make this even stronger. First, the bird is flying at an angle away from you - getting him parallel to the camera's sensor would make this stronger. Also, a busier BG works even better when it is evenly lit - when there are bright and dark spots they can tend to pull the viewer's eyes away from the focal point. If you can even out the dark area with a shadow/highlight adjustment you might be able to take this up another notch.
Good work on the bird...lots of good detail there - just need to watch those camera angles!