Starling

nice starling shot amin, you seem to get a good selection of birds,

Thanks Scott
I seem to still struggle with the ISO, its a monster that I need to learn about so that I can understand better and control. At the moment I still seem to dread it big time .

I got to find or read something about ISO, its making my head . At times very high ISO still come up quite ok like you saw the other shots, but on occasions even this one at 560 was pretty nasty. Is it the amount of blacks that have an effect? or the lighting? Dont know much about it.
All my goldies today came out pretty nasty due to high ISO settings. The other day even though with high ISO they came out nice after applying noise reduction. So I am assuming here that the amount of lighting on the subject has an effect on the shots. Hopefully someone will break this down in simple terms and tell me

It was a pretty dull morning so the ISO had to be bumped up.

Looks a bit to me that blue colour is oversaturated, maybe Whit Balance not corrected?.
Aminstar, point is to have picture properly exposed when using high ISO, properly means to give it as much light as possible. Simply when low amount of light hits the sensor the more pronouced the noise is - as the margin between these two is low), if sensor gets more light then obviously margin between usable signal and noise is bigger and noise is less visible.
You can make a simple test, using high ISO (and average or bad lighting conditions) take a picture with chosen exposure (let's call it middle), take same picture with i.e. exposure -1.5EV, one more picture with exposure +1.5EV. Later on when working on RAWs for latter two pictures, add +1.5EV to the picture taken with -1.5EV, substract -1.5EV from the last picture and compare all 3 pictures, you should clearly see a diference in noise.