Very close to a pygmy owl

Another beautiful bird in Patagonia is this pygmy owl, and I was so happy to get such a frame-filling picture of it. This is completely uncropped. The bird was perched on a tree just about 10 feet above the ground. It was outside the dining room window of our lodge, and I was outside again using my 500mm f/4 telephoto plus the 1.4x teleconverter. Normally I would have used a tripod, but I felt that if I spent the few moments in setting it up I might lose the great opportunity for such a wonderful image. This is a very small bird -- as the name implies -- so even though my lens was long, the subject - camera distance was only 15 feet. You can see that its head is angled downward. I didn’t know why this owl allowed such a close approach until it suddenly flew down into the tall grass below and grabbed a mouse. It had been so intent on watching its prey that my close proximity didn’t seem to bother the owl at all. My settings were 1/320, f/6.3, 200 ISO. In retrospect, I made the same mistake as with the austral parrot in yesterday’s post. I should have raised the ISO to make the shutter speed faster. I took this picture in 2012, and I was using the Canon 5D Mark II at the time. Had I used 800 ISO (which would have given me a shutter speed of 1/1250), the noise would have been more than I wanted. Perhaps I should have compromised at 640 ISO and a shutter speed of 1/1000.