The Three Stooges

Canon 7D
1/800 sec f/5.6 ISO 125

This is a pretty severe crop (~50 %). I liked the grouping of 3 in the square crop.

S/H, Sharpening CS5

The image quality is sadly very poor due to the amount of crop most likely. The position looks fine though. It's always best to get as close to the subject(s) as possible which eliminates the need to chop so much away.

Ian:

Agree with Akos about the image quality. It is an interesting composition, and I might be tempted to try some variations so that such a sig. crop isn't needed, while maintaining some of the feel you have here.

I might also try to tone down the luminosity of the grasses in the background a bit.

Randy

Ditto the above comments. Grouping and habitat are nice but suffer from IQ. Perhaps some NR might also help?

I like the composition and color. The head angles are excellent.

Given that I use the same camera and lens, I am a bit puzzled by the term "50% crop" in your post. The image looks like what I get at ISO 400 when I look at the image with one pixel in the camera being one pixel on the screen ("at 100%"), and the noise is even worse. An obvious suggestion, if you have not already done so, is to separate the birds from the background and foreground with a mask, not sharpen the background and foreground, and apply strong noise reduction to the background.

Based on a few months' experience, I think the 7D's sensor outresolves the 400mm f/5.6 lens, so that when you look at 100% at any shot taken with the 7D and 400mm f/5.6, it will always look somewhat blurry. I have some limited experience trying to sharpen such images (at ISO 400), and find I often get ugly sharpened noise.

I like your composition here Ian, the 3 birds are nicely framed. As Akos mentioned, a closer image would've been great here and perhaps given you a cleaner fg rather than having the oof grass cover the birds. And as Randy mentioned you may be able to try a less severe crop to retain some details.