Looking cool 
I would personally give the earflaps on the hat a bit of motion to add to the feeling of flight though, maybe you should give that a try? The smoothest animation of a bird I remember seeing was in the game Yoshis Island on the SNES. Maybe worth you checking that out?
Jason.
I was actually looking for sprites of the goonies from Yoshi's Island as reference, but to no avail
And I was going to eventually put in a bit of a flap to the earflaps, too, but I want to get the big problem out of the way first.
EDIT: They weren't exactly the sprites I was looking for, but I see what Adam was talking about:
You can see it in the last 2 frames there...
