About the water: I think it's a bit too turbulent in comparison to the size of the zebra's, but that may well be so in reality, I don't know. I'd prefer it to be a little smoother and some subtle movement. Same for the clouds; I'd make the softer a a bit larger, to get a less distracting sky. As for the mud; why not put a camera at the far side of the line of zebra's, point it to the render camera, make a distance shader, set it to Z distance, use as blender for a surface shader with some mud colors as child, and use the breakup to create some (stretched) soft mud streaks, as much as needed. Feed this surface layer into the water shader. Or, perhaps better, use the camera blender on one PF mudcolor which goes into the color input of a surface layer, and attach the water shader as its child. Or something like that....
I like the wideness of the scene and the banks are great! Look forward to seeing the next iteration.
