A family of barn owls has been documented nesting in a water tower atop a building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, marking the first confirmed case of barn owls nesting in Manhattan in modern history, according to experts. The discovery has drawn nightly crowds of onlookers eager to observe the elusive birds near Central Park West.
On October 6, 2026, Upper West Side resident Elisabeth Williams notified a local news outlet after she and her husband observed multiple owls at the water tower on West 75th Street, close to Central Park West. Williams had previously spotted a single owl on an apartment windowsill days earlier. “In a place like Manhattan, you normally really have to go out of your way to encounter nature,” she said. “And here it was, just sort of right outside our window.”
Migration ecologist Andrew Farnsworth of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology confirmed the rarity of the sighting. “To the best of our knowledge, like the collective birding knowledge, there hasn’t been a nest in, you know, in Manhattan, at least in recorded history,” Farnsworth stated.
The owls’ presence has added to a pattern of New Yorkers finding unexpected wildlife in the city. Past examples include American woodcocks migrating through Midtown Manhattan’s Bryant Park, the beloved Eurasian eagle-owl Flaco, who flew around the city after escaping a zoo enclosure in 2023 and died in 2024, and Pale Male, a red-tailed hawk that nested above Fifth Avenue for three decades. The barn owls’ arrival continues this trend of urban wildlife captivating city residents.