Burrowing owl - Where is my coffee ?!?

First time posting here for critique:

I photographed this burrowing owl in Cape Coral, Florida. My first time seeing this beautiful bird. Early in the morning I found this active burrow with this guy right behind a small hill. The sun was right behind me, but I could only see the top part of the owl (because of the hill). If I got higher the background got ugly. I decided to watch him for a little bit and was lucky enough to capture this picture.

Canon 7D Mk II
Canon 100-400 Mk II + 1.4TC Mk II, at 560mm
1/400
f/8
ISO 1600
Hand held, sitting down.

Processed with PS CS6. Cropped from horizontal to vertical, white balance adjusted (it had a very yellow color cast), mild selective noise reduction to the background and resized for web using Andreas Resch WebSharpener script.

I would have liked to use a smaller aperture to get all the bird in focus but I didn't want to go higher on my ISO or slower on my SS.

C&C are welcomed and appreciated.
Thanks for looking!

Happy shooting,
Juan

Juan, welcome to the forum. A few critiques, color looks a bit on the pink/red side, maybe a square crop would work better on this , to much room on top,
seems over sharpened and a bit noisy too. Looking forward to seeing more.

-Tim

Juan, I don't have anything super useful to add other than encouragement. That's pretty exciting to catch him yawning like that the first time you got to see one in the wild. It's got a great expression on it's face and the title of the post is perfect. I like the specs of sand on the beak and around the eye. I really like Tim's repost for both the color and the crop.

Thanks for your comments Tim and Noel. I agree with the crop and the color change, Thanks!
I see how the image doesn't look clean. I was not very aggressive with the sharpening but there is noise that makes it look "dirty". I will reprocess and re post. Thanks again!

I like this version more than the original but still not completely happy with the color. There is a bluish tint to the edge of the bird...
Let me know what you guys think,
Juan