Heron on Log - Part II

I had posted this image a few months ago.  Lots of brown stuff, green stuff and some yellow.  And I never pass up a log.  The bird is OK too.
When I posted this before, I wasn't sure of what type of bird it was - and now I know these are herons.
The original post is here.
This is the original posed image:

As I remember, at the time I really liked this image.  I was just getting into the 'bird' scene.
This one shows up well on the monitor.  It was taken at 1.3 image size with the 70-300 lens.  There a lot of math involved there, but it was relatively far away.  It is one of the few shots taken with the 1.3 image size that actually shows up well on the monitor.
So today I was looking for images to test the AI Clear filter and tried it on this one.  My purpose of the AIC filter is primarily noise reduction.  Not much visible noise in this image.  But on the image the sharpening/smoothing was fantastic.  I could crop in a bit more.  This is what I got today with AIC added to the workflow.

Outside of the AIC, I deepened the colors a bit more.  For focusing purposes, I keyed on the eye.  In this scenario, I hit the image with AIC first, then continued with ACR.  At the end though, I didn't need On One to finish up with sharpening.  I did try some dynamic contrast - but that didn't do much either.  So no On One with this one.
Maybe my eyes have adjusted a bit better over the last few months?