For wild life, you always want to use relatively big aperture for 2 reasons: 1 you need the shutter speed; 2 in most cases you want to blur the background. Normally I stop down 1/2 or 1 stop from the biggest aperture and in many cases I have to shoot wide open as there is not enough light.
In your case, I think one potential problem is 2x extender. From what I read, it really degrades the optical quality of the photo. Try a comparison on a still object with and without 2x and see the difference.