Pokemon: vaguely realistic mega-pidgeot (and passenger)

Not quite down to the wire but close enough and done enough as far as I'm concerned.  One vaguely realistic mega-pidgeot and rider/passenger for The Great Pokemon Sky Race collab.  Learned a bit about feathers and feathering (one of the things being I need to learn more) and decided against adding fwoosh as I could not work out how to make speed lines look convincing with this style and I didn't have time to do the motion blue I was thinking of doing.  Probably did agility and tail wind in rapid succession to run away from XantheUnwinArt's terrifying shiny mega-charizard but I suppose running away from anything on a similar angle will suffice as far as the end result goes.

We are racer number 37 which is spray painted onto the chest of the pidgeot partly as I imagine they would just write the numbers on directly like in most competitions I'm familiar with and partly because I forgot about it while 3d-ing.  I'm also riding bareback partly because I'm crazy like that and mostly because I ran out of time to make the saddle.

Technical stuff

Polygons: 38 809 verts | 36 430 faces | 75 228 tris
Render time: 01:35:52.42 (how was this one quicker than the other one? Well it's amazing what can happen when you remove multires modifiers you don't need at this distance ;)
Cycles | 1000 samples | full global illumatination

Resources

Blender
Dragonscale brush from DennisH2010
procedural leather shader from CgAlpha
procedural fabric normal map from Manuel L
Google Image Search for "mega pidgeot"