Thanks for the kind words everyone.
I took the picture in raw. this is the picture right out of the camera.
In Adobe Bridge Raw Editor I took exposure to -1.8, saturation to +100 (all the way up), contrast to +100 (all the way up), and I added a bit of vignetting. to get this:
In photoshop I did unsharp mask (forgot the names, but from top to bottom) 20, 60, 0. This will just up the contrast even more and make it more crisp. Then I did another unsharp mask at 150, 2, 10. This makes the bird and the fence and ground more sharp. That's all I did. The end result for these step (maybe slightly different from above):
exif =
Camera: Nikon D40
Exposure: 1/4000 sec
Aperture: f/1.4
Focal Length: 30 mm