Eagle before and After- Trying to learn

Trying to learn a little about photo editing in Photoshop Elements. Here's a before and after photo from a trip to the dump the other day. Before After
I'll try to remember what I did.
Started in lightroom, crop, exposure, fill light, brightness, blacks, contrast adjustments, did a brush adjustment on the eye - then opened image in Elements delete background (all but the bird and rock) clean up the beak (clone tool) clean up the remaining branches from the foreground bushes (clone tool) desaturated the Chromatic Aberration on the tail feathers with an adjustment layer Sharpened. I share this, because I know some of you are far better at this than I am. Hit me with what you would've done. Critique as much as you want, composition, camera settings, you can even tell me I should've used a Canon camera (although I'll likely ignore that comment until you drop such a camera and lenses in a box on my doorstep).