Rare barn owl family nests atop a Manhattan water tower and draws nightly crowds

The Upper West Side has new neighbors who only come out after dark. A family of barn owls has moved into a rooftop water tower on West 75th Street near Central Park West. Crowds now gather on the sidewalk every night hoping to spot them.

Birders believe it is the first barn owl nest ever documented in Manhattan. Andrew Farnsworth, a migration ecologist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, said the discovery came as a total shock to the people who track the city's birds.

Screams in the night

Neighbors had been hearing eerie shrieks since early September. Thomas Obersteiner said the noise sounded like someone was being murdered. More than once he or his wife ran into their children's bedroom thinking one of the kids was in pain. Only a news report told him the culprits were owls.

Elisabeth Williams and her husband first saw a single owl on an apartment windowsill. A few days later they spotted several at the water tower and tipped off a local news site on Oct. 6. A phone app had already matched the screeching to a barn owl but the couple did not believe it at first.

Five or six fledglings

David Barrett, a Manhattan birder behind a popular bird alert account, has counted at least one adult and five young owls. He has also watched a parent fly back to the tower with rodents. He thinks there are two adults and some photographers say they have seen six fledglings.

Barn owls rarely show up in city parks. New York sits at the northern edge of their range and state wildlife officials say their numbers have dropped sharply. Some onlookers worry the birds could eat rats laced with poison.

Obersteiner now invites nature photographers onto his roof deck almost every night, with as many as 20 people turning up at once. Williams was never a bird watcher. She says that may be about to change.