Hawkeye Season Finale's Murderous Owl Is Actually Inspired by a True Story

Hawkeye may have ended without a massive Avengers-level team-up or anything of that nature, but the eponymous archers did receive at least a little help in their escapades. In the show's season finale, Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner) finds himself trapped in the iconic Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center. Before long, Kate Bishop (Hailee Steinfeld) manages to cut him down—but not before he befriends an owl that's made its home within the tree.

As it turns out, the owl was a fun Easter egg to a real-world event that happened at 30 Rock last year. As some have started to point out online, there was an owl hiding out in the tree when loggers cut it down and transported it to the city from upstate New York for the 2020 holiday season. Rocky, as they called him, was quickly found and released back into the wild after a bit of rehabilitation.

The crew behind Hawkeye obviously knew of the story, as they put the same exact species of owl in the series.

Rewatched the #Hawkeye finale with my veterinarian dad, and all he could talk about was how great the owl was.

He was especially hyped that “they got the species right!!” (It’s a saw-whet owl, same as the actual owl who stowed away in the Rockefeller tree last year.) pic.twitter.com/j3sADCtFYC

— Devan Coggan (@devancoggan) December 26, 2021

After Barton uses another Pym arrow to shrink members of the Tracksuit Mafia, the owl reappears to take them and their shrunken moving van away. One VFX vendor revealed on Twitter that the post-credits scene was initially supposed to feature the return of the owl again as it hauled those same bros off to the owl's nest back in the tree.

"The post credits [of] the finale of Hawkeye was meant to have the owl taking the [bros] to its nest, kinda sad they cut it," Frame Machine animator Elaina Scott tweeted last week. "Would have been hilarious!!"

Every episode of Hawkeye is now streaming on Disney+.

What other street-level characters do you hope to see pop up in the MCU? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section or by hitting our writer @AdamBarnhardt up on Twitter to chat all things MCU!

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