Great Horned Owlets are getting hungry w/ repost

Gear: Canon EOS 10D + Sigma 300-800mm f/5.6 EX, 580EX, Velbon CF-640 tripod + Wimberley head.

Shooting info: 379mm, 1/200s, f/14.0, ISO 400, one-shot AF, Av priority, center-weighted metering @ 0, flash @ 0.

Processing: ACR raw conversion, crop (77% of full frame), s/h tool + levels + brightness & contrast + warming filter + saturation boost, USM + noise reduction, retouched eyes (brightened) & removed some "whitewash". All in PSE 3.

Good evening NSN'ers. Tonight I post what might be my last spring '05 shot from the Buenos Aires NWR area, southwest of Tucson, AZ. I've got other locations to move on to from my road trip. Taken in early May along the Arivaca Cienega trail, this photo shows a trio of Great Horned Owlets sitting in their nest in the fork of one of the giant cottonwoods.

I realize that nest shots can be a sensitive matter, and so I'm very careful if I pursue them -- and even more careful if I post them. This spot was pointed out to me by a local birder I met and talked to at the location -- always a good source of local intel. I had walked by and looked at this exact spot no less than 3 times during the day and not seen the owlets. They were that well camoflaged. The nest was only slightly higher than eye level, and just a few feet off a major trail (as you can see from this shot being at less than 400mm). One parent GHO was in the tree and evinced no concern at human presence as we shot from the trail.

I and a photographer from out east whom I had met earlier in the week at Madera Canyon (serious Nikon film shooter, nice chap, lost track of his name) shot these sleepy & hungry looking owlets for a brief time in the setting sun light. We were accompanied by my wife and the other chap's traveling companion. This is one of the few frames I shot using flash, sans BB. Again, the birds (including the parent) didn't appear to react at all, though they clearly knew we were there. So I felt reasonably confident that we were not harmfully impacting them.

A concern often is indirect impact such as drawing the attention of predators to the nest. This spot was so accessible and near the human-traveled trail that it didn't appear to be an issue in this case.

Nevertheless, the little owls possibly were being impacted by human attention. I encountered an older gentlemen at the location who proudly described how he and his grandson had piled a large broken limb against the tree so the youngster could climb up and take a flash snapshot of the three owlets at point-blank range. I suggested to him that this probably wasn't the greatest way to approach the birds but his response was there was no other way to get a good shot with the P&S camera they had. I left it at that.

I don't usually do a square crop but felt that worked best in this case. I have deliberately chosen this frame from the series I got, and processed it to leave the birds somewhat dark -- I like the way the birds really blend with the tree, and seem to be hugging the shadows as the sun rays play across part of their hide-out. (Although while we watched they did not actually move to avoid the light.)

Comments and critiques are welcomed as always!