A wishing I knew how to expose a picture or at least how to edit

looks like raising the shadows and lowering the highlights would work for starters. There are lots of plug-ins from Nik software and OnOne Software that allow you to make a quick selection and it does the work for you.

Nice shot Tom. I wayyyy overdid parts of this but I used OnOne's Adjust with about 30 seconds of effort. I'm sure someone can do better with more care.

Tom, if you have the RAW and are happy for me to have a go, I'd be happy to see what I can do. Just thought I'd offer as you have image editing as okay but if you have the RAW that would be better....

It seems that with 1/4000 and F 9 you would have had some room with exposure. A shutter speed of something like 1/2000 or 1/2500 would probably have been enough to " freeze" the bird. The exif states that exposure bias is 0. You would need at least + 1 or more ( overexposure) to get more light on the bird against the sky. Of course, as the examples show, you can remedy some of this in post-processing, but there's nothing better than getting it right when shooting.
Even so, it's a very nice picture with a great pose!
Peter

I certainly have my taken my share of images with the same problem as this one. But I am reminded of some photographic advice I once read and that is not to try to re-invent the wheel. There is lots of good advice out there, such as from Artie Morris and others, on how to properly expose a shot like this. The upcoming winter season is a good time for study and I, for one, plan to do some reading.

And Peter's advice is right on. Raw files are great but cannot always be depended upon to pull a rabbit out of the hat. Ian's reprocessing shows a lot of color noise which is what you get when you open up blacks and shadows. Better to do that with the initial exposure rather than through post processing.

Al

That is a shame, you can probably recover it well with a RAW file if the ISO is not too high.