The birds in my composites are anatomically incorrect. I always remove their tongues.
First, because long, skinny, pointy things are always a problem in compositing, and second, because once the bird seed is removed (as it always is) the tongue has no business sticking out. The only time I even think about leaving a tongue in the picture is when, as in the upper right sample shown below, you can see into the trough of the bird’s mouth. The tongue should be visible lying somewhere in the bottom of the beak, but since I don’t know what it would look like in that configuration, I can’t very well create one there. So, my birds have all been de-tongued.
I also leave out the two or three long skinny hairs (feathers?) that always seem to grow on the top of cardinals necks right where they meet the body (what would be the withers in a horse). Again, too skinny and long to be extracted cleanly, and just not worth the extra trouble.
The samples shown are straight crops from 100% view of originals. They should give you some idea of the true size of the composite images I make as compared to the extremely downsized versions that I show in this blog and on my web site.
Bizarre side note: while checking to be sure that bird tongues are called “tongues”, I ran across an entire page devoted to woodpecker tongues. Seems the creationists have claimed pecker tongues to support their claims. Hmmm…
