Different effects for bright white critters moving quickly?

So this is kind of gross - I have footage of maggots moving across a pigeon breast that I'm using for an art film. The maggots are fairly white, but the pigeon feathers and blood are all darker. With a track matte, colour keying, or an HDR effect or something, I want to be able to brighten and saturate the pigeon itself without blowing out the highlights on the maggots.

What would be the best way to approach this? The maggots move across the feathers in a couple of waves, so the effect applied to them has to be able to respond dynamically to what's happening, which makes me think that a track matte might not work as well. You can see the whitest (and therefore most problematic) wave of maggots here:

The full clip is here:

Any ideas would be appreciated, thx!

You could pull a key on the highlights, and then invert that key and try to brighten everything else. It's possible that a combination of adjusting the in/out ratio and using some tracking windows would help control the exposure in a useful way.