Have you seen all the photographers pointing their cameras up into the trees along the Greenbelt Lake path lately? Maybe you’ve heard the news of a nest of owls there. I hadn’t noticed until a tipster (Katy Gaughan) suggested I try to cover it for this very blog.

And thanks to the generosity of a serious photographer I found there – Wenhan Xue shown above – here are your close-ups of an adult barred owl and one baby.

From All About Birds: “Barred Owls live in large, mature forests made up of both deciduous trees and evergreens, often near water. They nest in tree cavities.”

Here’s what they sound like: