I must have looked at the picture 30 or 40 times before I posted it and a fair few times since and i never actually noticed that until you pointed it out - I've docked the sub editors wages.
Something that caught my eye immediately and definitely distracted from the photo - you have just learned something though which is great (and its amazing how much easier it is to spot things like this in other peoples pictures but you will look at your own closer next time)
It would actually be quite difficult to remove that by cropping though as you have not got any room to crop to the left or below the branch without removing some of the branch and changing the picture.
I'm not going to say equipment makes no difference, because it does
But, that's the beauty of it. If you meet the theme beyond the obvious then you'll have a chance at picking up the votes. I think there's been some really good entrys over the past few months by people with great technique, equipment etc... but because they've failed to think out of the box they probably haven't got as many votes as they might.
I have a mobile phone, a compact camera and a dSLR.
There is no doubting that the very best photos in terms of image quality etc are with the SLR - but many of my own personal favourite photos are taken with the phone or the compact camera, and given bright light, both can take excellent photos.
The eye for a photo and composition doesn't change much whatever you use