Natural Wonder

Hi everyone! This is my first post to the Man & Nature gallery and I had to do some quick calculations to be sure the "man" part of the image wasn't greater than 25%!

This is an ALMOST unposed image, taken at a bird sanctuary in Calgary, Alberta this past fall. My oldest, Jenaya, and my youngest, Josiah and I decided to take a side-trip here while returning from a photo shoot in the foothills, hoping for some fall colours and interesting feathers. We were disappointed to discover almost all of fall colours were now on the ground, and aside from a few chickadees, didn't find much for feathers either.

I had stopped to photograph a lone leaf that had gotten caught in some branches while my kids walked on ahead, and they suddenly heard a woodpecker and stopped abruptly. I looked up to ask if they had heard that and saw this scene and just instinctively fired a few shots. They kept looking and listening, so I had plenty of time to pick my angle and get set up, but eventually I asked Jenaya to hold her monopod out from her body a little and twist it so I could see the lens...other than that, this is simply a moment of wonder captured as it unfolded, and of course is probably much more meaningful to me personally than you, likely throwing my subjectivity off quite a bit!

I'm interested to hear your thoughts, along with suggestions for improvement. I've tried a few different crops, including a vertical crop that cut out the brighter sky in the upper LHS, but it seemed to lose something of the overall feel of the image. I also thought a tighter, horizontal crop worked decently, but ulitmately preferred the image as shot, with plenty of forest above my kids as they searched for what turned out to be a downy woodpecker.

Thanks for your time and comments!

Nikon D2X
AF Nikkor 80-400mm ED f/4-5.6 VR @98mm
ISO 320
1/15sec @ f/8
tripod mounted