A rare family of barn owls moved into Manhattan's Upper West Side. New Yorkers are captivated – Bozeman Daily Chronicle

A rare family of barn owls moved into Manhattan’s Upper West Side. New Yorkers are captivated  Bozeman Daily Chronicle

NEW YORK (AP) — Manhattan's Upper West Side has been reveling in the company of its latest celebrities: A family of barn owls nested in a water tower atop a building near Central Park.This is the first documented instance of barn owls nesting in Manhattan in modern history, according to one expert, and the owls have attracted nightly crowds of people in the street eager to get a glimpse of the elusive birds.“It was, like, totally shocking,” Andrew Farnsworth, a migration ecologist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, said of the barn owls. “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.”Word of the barn owl family didn't get around until last week, when Elisabeth Williams, an Upper West Side resident, notified a local news outlet on Oct.

6 that she and her husband saw multiple owls at the water tower atop a building on West 75th Street close to Central Park West.The couple had previously seen a single owl on an apartment windowsill a few days earlier and were shocked even then, Williams recalled.“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