Manhattan's newest celebrities live in a water tower — and they screech like a horror film

Elisabeth Williams was not a birdwatcher. Then she and her husband heard screeching outside their Upper West Side window, spotted an owl on a windowsill, and reported what turned out to be a first in recorded history: a family of barn owls — two adults and at least five fledglings — nesting in a water tower atop a building on West 75th Street, near Central Park. 'To the best of our knowledge, there hasn't been a nest in Manhattan, at least in recorded history,' said Andrew Farnsworth of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Nightly crowds now gather at dusk; a neighbour, Thomas Obersteiner, opens his roof deck to photographers 'almost every night' — 'We can't say no because it's so much fun.' As for Williams: 'I think we're about to become birders.'