Background color suggestions desired

I have a lot of these types of "Great Blue herons in flight" images, all taken on the same pond one summer and, while they may be technically adaquate, I don't consider them to be very artistic because they're getting lost in the follage background.

Well for one, the birds get lost in the highly saturated tall grasses behind them and on the water? Mask out the bird and the reflections of course. Other than that I like the multiple exposure you have captured

What I would do is to mask them all, move each one that needs to move so that you can place them all in a straight line, so that they will all look uniform.
I would then make a background that is suitable, such as a gradient, but is divided between the top and bottom. In other words, the top half would be one color, the bottom another... Space each so it would look as straight as possible so when you have the bird(s) in, it won't be too close to the horizontal divider line.
Doing it this way would make it more artsy, I think, of course the colors that you choose is up to you.
The background (to me) should be as clean as possible, meaning, no clutter, so it won't compete with the actual bird(s). You could have a gradient going horizontally, or vertically, whatever works for you best.

Another version would be to mask like above, remove the birds (on another Layer) and Gaussian Blur the entire background making it a pleasing watercolor effect that is already color-coordinated to the image.
(I actually like this better style than the above, but that's just me, plus, I'm still waking up)

One more would be to do the first part above, but instead of keeping the bird(s) looking realistic, make them more like line-work, (Warhol-ish) it'd take a little more clean-up to get it clean looking, but it could be pretty cool, if that is the kid of artwork you are into.

Hopefully this all makes sense.

Randy

If you have NIk Photo Efex 4, you could use the "Indian Summer" preset to change the colors of the green foliage in the background to a warm summer color. That would give you a better seperation of the birds to the background.

If you use photoshop, you could add a hue/saturation adjustment layer set to luminosity blend mode so you can darken/lighten color tones too.

You might try selective blurring to help keep the background from being too distracting as well.

Here's a quick edit with the above suggestions applied. My apologies in advance if these suggestions aren't what you had in mind at all.

Chauncey...your post is the funniest thing I've read all day...

chauncey wrote in post #14877409
I'm reasonably proficient at photoshop ... [Snip]

Chauncey saying he's "reasonable proficient at photoshop" is like Michael Jordan saying he's an "OK basketball player."

Selective colour might look pretty neat.
Mask the birds to save their colour and convert the rest to B&W.
Aligning the birds would certainly help too.

Aligning the birds would be possible, but...the birds and their reflections were selectioned as a unit based on where they were in their flight across the pond.

Gene, your suggestion was next on my agenda...I took some fall color shots of the pond that looks a lot like what your suggestioning...will try that as a background.

You embarass me sir...I know how to do stuff, I just don't know what to do.

Seems like we've seen this picture before. Nevertheless since you have selected all the birds, I'd suggest the following:
Make a new layer of the selection (all birds).
Fill the layer with some other color like gold or red.
Change blending to linear, or overlay (experiment) and vary opacity accordingly.
Fiddle with layer styles too.
You might come up with something interesting.