I'm not really one to give a lot of critique on exposure and tech things. I go more by if I like the photo or not and if it draws me in with the composition. With that in mind, photos 2 and 3 above draw me in more. The red tailed hawk is both of these photos is doing something interesting. Photo 2 you have been spotted (or it looks like it) and the hawk is deciding if you are a threat or not. It's very close to getting ready to fly. Maybe it's looking at that vole running under the grass out in the field. Whatever, the hawk is doing something interesting and causes the viewer to pause and figure out what is going on.
Photo 3 is a great action shot. Prey in the talons and lifting off. It tells the story of survival, the world of predator and prey. It was a very good day to be a hawk and a very bad day to be a vole.
As for exposure and the like, things said above sound accurate to me. From my own experiences, bare branches against a clear blue sky don't make for a very interesting background and fringing around the edges can be distracting, but if that is where the hawk is there's not a lot you, as a photographer, can do. It shows the environment where that animal lives and sometimes that is more important to the photo than absolute clarity or a milky blurry background. Just depends on the story you're trying to tell.
I really like the 3rd photo. Eye contact with the hawk, the action, the story it tells, enough background to have an idea of what type of environment it likes to hunt. Exposure looks good to me, at least it is close enough that you can do a lot in post processing to make it look however you want. I can't really tell about clarity because images need to be so downsized to post on the form it's really hard to tell a lot there but it looks good.
Hope this helps. It's just my opinion and others may differ.
Jeff