Dealing with extreme noise

I took this picture in 2016 in Kenya with the Canon 7D Mark II. It took two hours to get this shot. I had to use 4000 ISO because the light level was quite low. Plus, I wanted a fast shutter speed -- 1/3200 -- to freeze the white-throated bee eater in flight. This camera is known for having a lot of noise, especially at high ISO settings, and the image of the birds turned out to be outrageously bad. The noise was so large and gritty it seemed like there was no detail in the feathers at all. It was virtually solid noise. I applied Neat Image software to deal with this, but the results were not good. The colors turned out smeared because there was virtually no detail to reconstitute the image. Four years later -- i.e. yesterday -- I tried DeNoise AI as well as Sharpen AI, both by Topaz, and I was blown away. The image has been transformed from completely unusable to beautiful. It’s still not like I shot 200 ISO, but these two programs saved this picture. I used a 100-400mm Canon zoom plus a 1.4x teleconverter giving me 560mm of focal length. It was after this trip to Africa that I sold the 7D Mark II. I’ll be discussing this technique, and showing the original capture, in the October issue of Photo Insights, my free monthly eMagazine. If you’d like to subscribe, please do so on the home page of my website: jimzuckerman.com. Also, I have a Photoshop Online Training course starting in two days. If this might interest you, click HERE.