Female Cardinal Landing

Here's a shot from Bill Forbes's property in Amado, Arizona. The cardinals were landing on this perch as they came in to the feeders, so I manually prefocused on the spot, took my head out from behind the camera, so I could see what was going on and fired away rounds as they landed. This was my favorite image of one. The eye was pretty dark so I applied a selective levels adjustment there, it's still a little darker than I liked but anything more looked unnatural. I thought about lifting the shadows of the underwings but any shadow adjustment brought too much noise into the feathers, so I left it as is. I cloned out one branch in the bg. About 60% of frame.

MkIII 500F4 1/5000 F6.3 iso 640, evaluative metering -0.3, Gitzo tripod, blind