Okay so here is what happened. I focused directly on the bird. Same shutter, aperature, ISO for each picture, only difference was I changed the meter. Literally no change at all, bird is still too dark in all of them.
I did another run of doubling ISOs under each meter and yeah the bird got brighter, but the sky went from blue to white. I don't know how to get the bird bright and the sky blue like in
>>3488027 