The True Story of the Lost Rockefeller Center Christmas Owl

Plenty of holiday specials set a festive mood for the season, but few can claim to be inspired by actual events. The new Disney+ short An Almost Christmas Story is one of those rare exceptions, with a true story backing up its heartwarming fantasy. It tells the tale of a tiny owl who takes shelter in a towering spruce tree, only to have her forest home hauled to New York City as the centerpiece of a world-famous Christmas display. This really happened in 2020, and, fortunately, had a picture-perfect happy ending.

An Almost Christmas Story is directed by David Lowery, best known for The Green Knight and Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, and produced by Alfonso Cuarón, the Oscar-winning filmmaker behind Gravity, Roma, and the recent revenge series Disclaimer. Neither is particularly known for sugary storytelling, so there are elements of peril and hints of sadness here—the sort of texture that adds depth to the most memorable holiday specials. Those traces of darkness are burnished, of course, by acts of comfort and joy drawn from reality, seen in the efforts that helped save the little creature’s life.

There are whimsical fictional elements as well, as the frightened owl named Moon finds comfort in another lost soul: a young human named Luna, who is also struggling to survive in the city. An Almost Christmas Story’s cityscape is designed to look like rough-hewn cardboard cutouts, and its central characters resemble wood carvings, giving the special a handmade feel even though it was digitally animated.

“This is technically my second Christmas movie, because The Green Knight is a Christmas film,” Lowery says, “that is very much about the intrusion of civilization upon nature. And that was intrinsically part of what I really liked: The idea of taking a tree out of its natural environment and bringing it into civilization.”

In the darkest and coldest times, we yearn for a connection with nature. That’s almost certainly what partially led to the ancient tradition of bringing a tree inside with us. In the case of An Almost Christmas Story, that impulse simply brings too much nature with it, and the little owl must be rescued and returned to her habitat. All the great Christmas tales are about giving back, after all.

“When the holidays come around, you start to consider the people who aren’t as lucky as you might be,” Lowery says. “That makes us just slightly more aware of everyone’s wants and needs. You see that when there’s a Christmas tree where you can go bring toys for kids who wouldn’t otherwise have a Christmas. There are so many opportunities for us to be more present for our fellow humans—and nonhumans alike.”

Courtesy of Ravensbeard Wildlife Center

This is why the owl’s story still resonates, even years later. “Cute animals are an incredible gateway to empathy,” Lowery says. “I certainly remember hearing that news story and seeing the image of that little [owl] wrapped in the orange blanket and just thinking, Well, that is the cutest thing I’ve ever seen. But then you think about the context: This little owl thought it was safe, in a place that it should be safe in, then wakes up and finds itself in an incredibly threatening environment. That is a reminder to us that, yes, we are not the sole inhabitants of this planet, and our whims and our wants and needs should not take precedence over the well-being of all creatures, big and small.”

Fortunately, it’s a message that many people already understand. In the case of the real owl, a handful of good humans came together to demonstrate the best of our own nature.

The good deeds that inspired An Almost Christmas Story transpired four years ago, when workers who were erecting the towering Christmas tree beside the skating rink in Rockefeller Center discovered a stowaway amid the branches: a miniature owl that they initially assumed was a baby because of its small size. Ellen Kalish, executive director of the Ravensbeard Wildlife Center, immediately knew that couldn’t be the case when she got the call to help with the rescue. “There aren’t any baby owls born from December to May,” she says.

It was actually a full-grown northern saw-whet owl, a species that takes its name from the sound it makes. Although the bird in the animated film is named Moon, the real creature was nicknamed “Rocky,” after the skyscraper complex where she was found.

This species is about the size of a songbird, much smaller than a barn owl or great horned owl, which leads many observers to mistake saw-whet owls for fledglings. While their larger brethren feast on rats and other rodents, the saw-whets tend to consume smaller fare, which is why many migrate south when the weather turns bitterly cold. “They’ll eat bugs. They like grasshoppers and crickets,” Kalish says. “They’ll eat just about anything that crawls or wiggles.”

That’s why the bird from the Rockefeller Christmas tree was in such distress when the workers found her. She was starving, having been trapped in the tree for several days. Its branches had been wrapped to protect them on the windy 170-mile drive from the woodlands of Oneota in upstate New York to the tree’s holiday destination in midtown Manhattan. By the time the tree arrived, the saw-whet owl tucked inside it had gone far too long with nothing to eat. It wouldn’t have found much that was appetizing in its strange new concrete surroundings, either. “She was too weak to fly away,” Kalish says.

In real life, there was no needy little girl to help the owl (and no streetwise pigeons to advise her, either.) Instead, the wife of one of the workers took the creature in a cardboard box and reached out to the Ravensbeard Wildlife Center. “I was shocked when I got to see her for the first time,” says Kalish. “I opened the box, and here’s this little tiny owl looking up at me with bright eyes. The wings were intact and the feather perfect. I’m thinking, What the heck could have happened?”

Why didn’t Rocky fly away? Kalish’s best guess is that the owl flew into the tree after it was felled. “No owl is going to sit in a tree that’s going over. I mean, every bird is going to fledge if they can,” she says. “What we believe happened is once they got the tree on the truck at like 5:00 in the morning before they tied it down, we think she flew in.”

Saw-whet owls like to hunt for bugs from low-slung bushes, which is probably what the tree looked like on its side. When the tree’s branches were later wrapped, she simply became trapped.

After eight days, Rocky was ready to return to the wild—but by then, she had become a media star, which put Rocky in a new kind of danger. Kalish declined many requests to film or photograph the bird, and she released it with no media fanfare (although Kalish’s group made a video that you can see below). Where did Rocky wind up? “We found a really nice spot on Ohio Mountain in Woodstock,” she says.

Nobody knows what became of Rocky after that. Saw-whet owls typically live to the age of four in the wild, so if she’s still hunting in the woods of New York state, she is now a fairly old lady. Kalish did not do anything to help track her whereabouts or mark her as the famous Christmas owl. “I did not want people harassing Rocky,” she says. “Sure enough, a week after we released her, people would say, ‘I saw a saw-whet in my yard. Could it be Rocky?’ I’m thinking, For crying out loud, leave the bird alone. I chose not to band her. I just wanted her to be free and have a life.”

The story of Rocky the owl has become humanity’s keepsake.

Her big-city adventure has been immortalized in Lowery’s new animated film; the Marvel Studios series Hawkeye also included a callout to the little feathered hunter in its finale, when Jeremy Renner’s sharpshooting hero plummets from on high into the Rockefeller Center tree. Numerous children’s books have also been written about Rocky’s experience, including The Little Owl & The Big Tree, by Jonah and Jeanette Winter. Rocky’s real-life rescuer wrote her own storybook, The Christmas Owl, which Kalish collaborated on with writer Gideon Sterer and illustrator Ramona Kaulitzki. The wildlife shelter also sells Rocky the Owl tree ornaments, coffee mugs, and T-shirts to raise money for its rescue efforts.

Courtesy of Ravensbeard Wildlife Center

The Ravensbeard Wildlife Center doesn’t own Rocky’s rights, so anyone can retell her story, but the little owl has become a kind of mascot for the shelter. Rocky’s legacy is now helping to protect other wildlife creatures in need of rescue and rehabilitation. “We are a nonprofit, and we survive on the kindness of our donors,” says Matt Kalish, Ellen’s son, who helps oversee the organization. “We can’t charge for any of these services, and it is really expensive. We spend about $1,200, $1,500 a month on feed. Any eyes and attention we can get and any donations that we can add to keep doing this for another 25 years, we’re really grateful for.”

Lowery said he hopes An Almost Christmas Story will help remind people of Ravensbeard’s work during the upcoming giving season.

“It’s important to remember that that was a real bird, and there are people who are dedicated to taking care of birds like that,” he says. “If this movie does anything, I hope that it increases the amount of donations that that sanctuary gets. Because that is far more important than the warm fuzzies that we get from watching a cute owl finding itself in New York City.”

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