A harsh, raspy scream has been echoing through the backyards of Upper West Side buildings for the past month, and the culprit turns out to be one of the rarest birds to visit a New York City park: an American Barn Owl. Residents between West 75th and 76th streets, in the stretch running from Columbus Avenue to Central Park West, say they first heard the eerie call on the night of September 6, and it has returned periodically in the evenings ever since.
The first confirmed photograph came from Elisabeth Beall Williams, who spotted the owl and snapped what she described as a poor-quality image from the back patio of a building at the corner of West 76th Street and Central Park West. As reported by West Side Rag, Williams said she and her neighbors used the Merlin Bird ID app to make a first guess at the species before seeking outside confirmation. In an email cited by the outlet, Williams reported that the owl had been visiting the neighborhood for roughly a month.
Confirmed by Manhattan's Bird-Watching Network
That confirmation came from Manhattan Bird Alert, which told West Side Rag that Williams's photo did in fact show a Barn Owl. The sighting is notable because, per the New York City Parks Department, Barn Owls are extremely rare sights in most city parks and remain uncommon across Manhattan as a whole. The department also notes that the species' calls sound like a harsh, raspy scream — matching exactly what West Side residents say they have been hearing outside their windows since early September.
Despite the rarity label, Barn Owls aren't complete strangers to the five boroughs. The Parks Department points to past sightings in Pelham Bay, the New York Botanical Garden, and Floyd Bennett Field, the same locations named in the West Side Rag report. The NYC Bird Alliance adds that Barn Owls, along with Great Horned and Northern Saw-whet Owls, are regularly found roosting in Manhattan parks over the winter months.
Why Manhattan Draws Rare Visitors
Manhattan's patchwork of parks functions as an unlikely magnet for wildlife passing through one of the most built-up landscapes in the country. The NYC Bird Alliance explains that millions of songbirds, raptors, and waterbirds migrating along the Atlantic Flyway pass directly through New York City, using the borough's green spaces as rest stops amid the skyscrapers. Manhattan eBird records have logged a total of 340 bird species in the borough, according to the same source — a reminder that even a famously human-dense island hosts a surprising amount of avian traffic.
Owl sightings elsewhere in the city hint at how fleeting these visits can be. At Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn, the pine grove at the Ecology Village has occasionally served as a day roost for Barn Owls, per the NYC Bird Alliance's Brooklyn birding guide. And a blog post from the Urban Hawks site recounts an American Barn Owl discovered roosting in a Central Park pine tree on a December 30th, which the writer noted had not been relocated for 48 hours at the time of posting. A separate Urban Hawks account describes a different encounter in which a Barn Owl perched in a Central Park tree, then swooped down to catch a rat before flying southwest out of sight; that post also noted that other coyote watchers had reportedly seen a Barn Owl about once a month that spring.
For a month, a handful of Upper West Side blocks have had an unlikely nighttime soundtrack: the harsh scream of a bird the city's own parks department calls one of the rarest sights in New York.
