Singing his heart out – minimal editing

I liked that I caught this male northern cardinal singing away, but I really dislike all of the distracting branches near his body. Check out my next photo where I did a ton of editing to remove these elements. I even cloned the branch he’s sitting on to get rid of the branch in front of it. I wouldn’t try to get away with this in a photo contest, but I wanted to play around and see how much I could improve the image at least to my eye.