Nice photo, Click.
I've found that shots like this (to me) tend to really burn out the white(highlight) in the bird image since it's the only bright thing in the scene, and it's a small percentage of the area, and the rest is pretty dark. So unless you expose your shot at -2(or so) stops I end up with burnt out highlights which make seeing feather detail impossible. Some of my previous posts have a bit of burnout in the heads of birds from the sun since I didn't underexpose(or bracket) the image. I often try to bracket my exposures as -2, -1, 0 to avoid cases like this, but then I get triple the shots to wade through in post (and I already take too many) so it's a trade-off. Sometimes I just set it to -1/3 or -2/3 and take single exposures and tolerate a little loss of shadow in order to avoid most burnout and too many photos in post.
