Morning with a Great Blue Heron on the river bank. The GBH was fishing and enjoying the view, just like me.
AG1_2856.NEF (29.6 MB)
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I tried to ignore your result as much as possible, and afterwards it is funny to see that we both cloned out some branches and both decided for a similar crop, although not of the same area.
My image has a lot less contrast than yours. As always, a matter of taste.
I did the RAW conversion in Dxo PL6, exported the result as a new DNG-file and did some further editing in Picture Window Pro, but PS could have done the same as PWP of course. There is no information about the camera/lens combination in the EXIF, so PL6 could not do the specific optical corrections for this combination. I used a generic color profile for the Nikon Z6.
In PWP I stretched the histogram to full range, increased the contrast in the midtones and cloned out the branches on the right edge and part of the branch that points out to the heron (like you apparently did). Increased the saturation a bit, leaving low and high saturation untouched. Some sharpening on the heron.
As you see, my bird is less “tropical” than yours 
