You caught a wonderful pose! The BG is lovely but the bird would be more pleasingly located if it were left of the center of the frame. You don’t give any clue as to your processing and the tools, but these days it is easy to add canvas and fill it in realistically with several methods. I would add on the left and crop from the right, with the amount depending on how much I added.
The bird has blocked up blacks. Raw converters have excellent control over pulling out more detail in darks. Go by the histogram more than your monitor. You should be able to salvage a lot from this one. If the blacks get too noisy that it also easy to fix.
Not much to add to @Diane_Miller critique. The only thing I’d add is that the out of focus cattail spike in front of the foot is a bit annoying. There’s not much you can do about it at this point without resorting to AI or if there was a breeze, looking to see if you have a frame where it’s off to one side a bit and stealing that area to put in this frame (always worth checking in situations like this). Moving just a tiny bit to the left might have exposed that foot as well, but I do see there’s another cattail on the left that might have posed a problem. These birds are really difficult for that very reason-finding a clear opening is difficult.
Thank you for your constructive criticism. I am aware that I sometimes crop to tight. I did try to get rid of that out of focus cattail. I am not sure about how to fix the blacks, but I will try and maybe repost.
