collecting

Great capture of this bird at work.Good details on the bird and the hay stack and the blurry roadside fence background is a good complementary support in this excellent image.Bravo!

Salutations-Laurent

It doesn't look like a haystack, it looks like a back of a furry animal... :-)

Really great shot, anyway.

Regards.

That's correct Jack, it is on the back of a horse

Els, there are to my eye some good things about this shot and some things which could be improved.   First of all, it's a nice capture of an interesting aspect about the bird's life.  You have eye contact, and the exposure seems spot on.  It's an arresting capture which caught my eye.  I like the contrast between the black bird and the reddish hair of the horse.

Now, the background is to my eye a little too much in focus, and to a small extent distracts from the main subject, but it's not a major issue.  To address this issue, you could in post apply a quick mask to the background and apply a Gaussian blur.  When I view the larger version of the image, the background seems to have a lot of noise.  You mentioned that this is a crop, so I suspect that is the main cause of the noise.  You could perhaps use a bit stronger noise reduction on the background to mitigate that aspect, or if you do apply a Gaussian blur, that should take care of this issue also.

A more important compositional issue is that there is more space to the right of the bird than there is to the left, the direction in which the bird is facing.  If this is a crop, perhaps there is a possibility of re-cropping to remove space to the right, and move the bird to the right in the frame, giving a bit more "head space" for the bird.

Despite these issues, I find the image very pleasing.  Well done.

Best regards,

Dennis