Great egret with a great background

This picture was actually several years in the making. I photographed the great egret in the Alligator Farm in St. Augustine, Florida in 2007. It's one of the best places for bird photography because so many wild birds nest there every Spring. The bird was in breeding plumage, and the myriad fine feathers were impossible to select with any degree of realism. The original shot was very nice, but I wanted something even better. Yesterday, I finally figured it out. I selected the bird plus its immediate environment, and using the pulldown menu command Image > adjustments > levels in Photoshop, I increased the contrast of the selection so the dark green foliage went black. I then pasted that contrasty selection into the sunset landscape. But here is the key -- the bird had to be pasted against a dark area of the new background. Only then could I retain all of the remarkable detail in the breeding feathers. I have other versions of this in which the egret is much larger and you can see all the detail in the plumage, but I thought this version was more compelling. My original settings for the egret shot were 1/500, f/5.6, and 250 ISO, and I used a Canon 500mm f/4 telephoto to capture the image.