--- title: "Barn owl family nests in an Upper West Side water tower, likely Manhattan’s first in a century" url: https://badiyaa.com/barn-owls-nest-upper-west-side-manhattan/ published: 2026-10-15T03:45:00+01:00 modified: 2026-10-15T03:45:00+01:00 section: Pets & Animals publisher: Badiyaa --- # Barn owl family nests in an Upper West Side water tower, likely Manhattan’s first in a century Two adults and up to six young are using a rooftop tank near West 76th Street, and the late brood should depend on its parents into early November. Two adult American barn owls and as many as six young are living in a rooftop water tank near West 76th Street and Central Park West, and local birders believe it is the first barn owl nest recorded in Manhattan in roughly a hundred years. The young birds have started making short practice flights around the tank after dark while their parents hunt. The first clue was noise. Upper West Side resident Elisabeth Williams heard harsh screeching from her patio for weeks in September, ran the sound through the Merlin bird-ID app, and on October 3 finally photographed the bird, which she nicknamed Scotty. Birder David Barrett, who runs the Manhattan Bird Alert account on X, then photographed the whole family at a hole in the tank. ## Why a Manhattan nest is a big deal New York City’s Parks Department calls barn owls “extremely rare sights in most New York City parks,” with past sightings at Pelham Bay, the New York Botanical Garden and Floyd Bennett Field. New York sits at the northern edge of the species’ range, and development has eaten into the rough grassland these owls normally hunt over. Paul Sweet, who looks after the bird collection at the American Museum of Natural History, said the birds suggest “some environments in New York City are becoming more raptor-friendly.” The species itself is newly defined. The [American barn owl (*Tyto furcata*)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_barn_owl) became a separate species in 2024, when ornithologists split the worldwide barn owl into American, Eastern and Western species, according to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Cornell’s researchers say no animal tested has located prey by sound alone better than a barn owl, and the birds cough up roughly two pellets of bone and fur a day. The timing is unusual too. In North America most barn owls nest between March and June. A rough count backward from what birders are seeing shows how late this brood is: - Young barn owls are fully feathered and start leaving the nest at about 9 weeks old. - If the owlets began test flights in the first week of October, they hatched around the start of August. - Incubation lasts about 30 days, so the first egg was probably laid in early July. - The young stay dependent on their parents until about 13 weeks, which runs into early November. That is an estimate built on textbook averages, not a measured date, but it means the parents will still be feeding hungry young on Manhattan rodents for several more weeks. That is the main worry. “Rats in New York City are often poisoned by rodenticide, meant to kill the rats. But actually what it does is kill the predators that feed on those rats,” Jessica Wilson, executive director of the NYC Bird Alliance, said this week. Flaco, the Eurasian eagle-owl that escaped the Central Park Zoo, had four kinds of rat poison in his body when he died after hitting a building in 2024. ## The clip: a patient photographer’s four minutes The best footage so far comes from Bruce Yolton, who films birds in and around Central Park and posted a 4-minute-1-second clip titled “2026-10-07 American Barn Owl” on his own YouTube channel. In his notes he says he had been seeing barn owls in Central Park for about 18 months, searched for several nights after photos surfaced online, and on October 7 found three owls on the tank. He counts “two adults and at least five owlets, possibly six.” What works is the restraint. The video is shot from far below with a long lens, in fading natural light, with tree leaves blurred in the foreground. Owls sit on the cone-shaped roof of the water tank, and in one stretch a bird lifts its wings. There is no visible flash, and the picture grows grainy as dusk turns to dark, which is the honest cost of not lighting up a night hunter. Yolton’s caption is also careful: he writes that this “may be the first record of a nest in Manhattan in the last century,” and notes that barn owls certainly nested on the island centuries ago. The limits are real. At that distance the owls are small, soft silhouettes, so the clip cannot settle how many young there are, and it shows little of the nest itself. Yolton also writes that once others found the birds, the nest location became public, which is exactly the situation in which crowds grow night after night. ## If you go to see them The [Raptor Center at the University of Minnesota](https://raptor.umn.edu/about-raptors/raptor-watching-ethics) puts the test simply: if the birds change their behavior, you are too close, and you may be the 50th person at the site that evening, so the disturbance adds up. Never leave food, because the parents’ food deliveries are what bond the young to them. Bird photography guidance from the National Audubon Society asks people not to use flash on owls at night, since it can briefly hamper their ability to hunt and avoid obstacles, and not to play recorded calls. Watch from the sidewalk, keep your voice down, and respect the residents whose courtyards back onto the tank. The owlets should be hunting on their own by around the second week of November, when the family is likely to disperse; in the United States, young barn owls typically settle 50 to 199 miles (80 to 320 kilometers) from where they hatched. ## Further reading - [Wikipedia: American barn owl](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_barn_owl) - [The Raptor Center, University of Minnesota: Raptor watching ethics](https://raptor.umn.edu/about-raptors/raptor-watching-ethics) *Image: Brian Ferguson, USFWS Mountain-Prairie, Public domain via Wikimedia Commons* *This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. [How we work](/editorial-policy/).*