Spotted Sandpiper - background issue

[Richard Stern]

I felt that this image of a Spotted sandpiper was acceptable in terms of the bird and the pebbles but the background (seaweed) was very distracting and needed something doing to it. So I selected what I thought was appropriate and used fairly heavy Gaussian blur to try and "improve" it. Is there a better way, is the whole image worth keeping or not, or any other thoughts?

D300, Nikon 80-400VR, 1/100, f9.0, ISO 800.

Thanks,

Richard

[Gus Cobos]

Hi Richard,
I like the composition, it is a keeper, I modified you image just a bit to show you the enhancements...I cropped from the left of the frame to off set the bird, I cropped from the bottom just a tad. blurred the background more and desaturated the colors. I selective sharpened the eye and the wings, and tone down the whites on the top of the rock...hope you like...:cool:

[Richard Stern]

Thanks Gus - very helpful.

Richard

[Jackie Schuknecht]

I think this is very pretty, another suggestion might be to try using a blue fill layer and erase you BG and put in sky. Would be a fair bit of work though.