White-crowned Sparrow

Doesn't look like you need much help! This is lovely. The only help I can offer is that I see some noise on the bg, which at that ISO is not surprising. Some noise reduction on bg only would help. Bird, composition, and perch are all wonderful. Sharon

A touch more room next to the birds tail would be nice Dan, but this is a fine first post. A very pretty BG , that I would definitely use some noise-reduction on.
Hope to see more !

Dan, I like most everything about this first post (nicely done). I agree about the NR, but also looks like you should have increased your speed a little. Using 1/125 gave you a couple of motion blurs on the top of the head and tail. Not sure you were trying for that.

Beautiful Dan. The details and bg are great and looks like the lens looks great

Looks like that lens is working very well, Dan. I can spot a bit more blur than expected but I agree with Kurt that you need to decrease your exposure time more. Even if 1/125 is o.k. for preventing camera motion effects it can be too long for preventing bird motion effects! You can try some selective post processing. However, from my experience it's so easy to introduce artifacts in this situation that it's so much easier to try to avoid motion blur on the next one. The noise level looks fine. The background is great! The only change in composition you might want to consider is to prune that little branch next to the bird's head to make it significantly shorter (and less competitive) with the bird. Nice try.

Excellent detail in the bird, Dan. Some of the whites in the crown look a touch hot to my eye. There's a lot of color noise in the bg of the larger image-you might want to do a bit of noise reduction on it. I might take a touch off both the top and the bottom, but I think that's just me-vertical format almost always feels a bit tall for my taste.

Love the BG. A beautiful shot.