Marie Winn, the writer who chronicled the avian sensation Pale Male, a red-tailed hawk who took up residence on the overhang of an Higher East Aspect house constructing solely to be evicted in 2004, sparking protests by birders who had been thrilled to observe him woo lovers with disemboweled rats, died on Dec. 25 in Manhattan. She was 88.
Her loss of life, at a hospital, was confirmed by her son Michael Miller.
After publishing a number of books within the Nineteen Seventies and ’80s in regards to the altering nature of childhood, Ms. Winn started writing a column on mom nature for The Wall Avenue Journal in 1989. That profession flip finally put her on the heart of an only-in-New-York-Metropolis melodrama.
It started in Central Park, the place Ms. Winn began chook watching in 1991, the 12 months an unusual-looking red-tailed hawk arrived from locations unknown.
As an alternative of the darkish brown options that sometimes mark red-tailed hawks, this one had light-colored plumage. Ms. Winn named the curious fellow Pale Male. She and different chook watchers of Central Park — “the Regulars,” as Ms. Winn known as them — adopted him in every single place.
“Shortly after his arrival in Central Park,” she wrote in her e-book “Red-Tails in Love: A Wildlife Drama in Central Park” (1998), “Pale Male had found a looking floor that was to grow to be his favourite: an space close to the park entrance at Fifth Avenue and 79th Avenue — the killing nook, because the Regulars dubbed it.”
Every single day, a person fed a flock of pigeons there. Pale Male watched from a chimney.
“Peering down intently, Pale Male would get your hands on one which was imperceptibly slower, clumsier, stupider,” Ms. Winn wrote. “Then he would plummet down in that breathtaking dive falconers name a stoop. Bingo.”
Pale Male preferred the neighborhood a lot that he determined to settle at 927 Fifth Avenue, a 12-story luxurious house constructing close to the nook of East 74th Avenue. The constructing, which has a view of Central Park, was additionally residence to the actress Mary Tyler Moore.
Pale Male did most of his mating on the Twelfth-floor cornice. He additionally often vacationed at a constructing close by, on Woody Allen’s penthouse terrace.
Ms. Winn and “the Regulars” had been consumed by Pale Male’s romantic life, naming his succession of girlfriends First Love, Chocolate and Blue. The birders sat on a bench exterior the park with binoculars ready for motion, shouting, “They’re doing it!” after they had been doing it.
There was heartbreak, too. First Love “ate a poisoned pigeon and died on a ledge of the Metropolitan Museum,” Ms. Winn wrote in The Wall Avenue Journal. Chocolate, she added, died in “a collision on the New Jersey Turnpike.”
However maybe essentially the most lamentable occasion in Pale Male’s life occurred in December 2004, when the co-op board at 927 Fifth Avenue, fed up with rat carcasses and chook droppings falling to the constructing’s entrance sidewalk, voted to remove Pale Male’s nest, upending his courtship of his new consort, Lola.
Protests exterior the constructing attracted nationwide media consideration.
“I’m restraining myself, Margot, from being obscene,” Ms. Winn said on NPR’s “All Issues Thought-about,” addressing the interviewer, Margot Adler. “I’m so offended about this.”
So was Mary Tyler Moore.
“These birds simply stored coming again to the sting of the constructing, and folks stored coming again to see them,” she told The New York Occasions, including, “This was one thing we like to speak about: a kinder, gentler world, and now it’s gone.”
New York Metropolis residents expressed their dismay by way of the 2004 model of Twitter — letters to the editor.
The hawks had been “all about location, location, location: what a view they’d of the park, and what a view we had of them,” Matthew Wills of Brooklyn wrote to The Occasions. “Like those that destroy a landmark in the midst of the evening, these accountable for destroying the nest at 927 Fifth Avenue have proven their contempt for the town they name residence.”
Every week later, in response to strain from the Nationwide Audubon Society, the co-op board reversed its choice. On the morning of Dec. 28, staff eliminated an equipment on the touchdown that had prevented the hawks from alighting.
“Very quickly in any respect Pale Male and Lola landed on the nest website,” Ms. Winn wrote. “Later that afternoon Lola was seen bringing a brand new twig to the nest.”
Marie Wienerova was born on Oct. 21, 1936, in Prague. Her father, Josef Wiener, was a physician. Her mom, Hanna Taussigova, was a lawyer and later a broadcaster. After emigrating to New York Metropolis in 1939, her mother and father modified their names to Joseph and Joan Winn.
Marie Winn attended Radcliffe School and graduated from the Columbia College Faculty of Basic Research in 1959. She turned a contract journalist, contributing articles to The Occasions and different publications.
She married Allan Miller, a filmmaker, in 1961.
As they began a household, Ms. Winn started publishing books for younger readers, together with “The Fireplace Ebook of Youngsters’s Songs” (1966), for which her husband wrote the musical preparations; “The Man Who Made Nice Tops: A Story About Why Individuals Do Totally different Sorts of Work” (1970); and “The Sick Ebook: Questions and Solutions About Hiccups and Mumps, Sneezes and Bumps, and Different Issues That Go Mistaken with Us” (1976).
In 1977, Ms. Winn wrote “The Plug-in Drug: Television, Children, and the Family,” a social critique about TV’s position within the residence. The e-book was extensively praised. Writing in The Occasions Ebook Overview, the tv critic Stephanie Harrington known as it a “a number of warhead launched in opposition to the nice American pacifier.”
Ms. Winn adopted with “Youngsters With out Childhood: Rising Up Too Quick within the World of Intercourse and Medication” (1983) and “Unplugging the Plug-in Drug” (1987), a sequel to her earlier e-book.
She additionally translated works by Czech writers, together with Vaclav Havel, the playwright who was the final president of Czechoslovakia.
Alongside together with her son Michael, Ms. Winn is survived by her husband; one other son, Steven; and 4 grandchildren. Her sister, the New Yorker author Janet Malcolm, died in 2021.
A red-tailed hawk believed to be Pale Male was discovered sick not removed from 927 Fifth Avenue in 2023 and died a short while later.
Ms. Winn returned to nature writing in 2008 with “Central Park in the Dark: More Mysteries of Urban Wildlife,” wherein she wrote — delightfully, reviewers stated — about moths, cicadas and screech owls. She additionally mirrored on how Pale Male had turned, in her opinion, “the primary avian famous person.”
“Pale Male — the very identify was a vital ingredient in creating this hawk’s superstar. It fell trippingly from the tongue,” she wrote. “Individuals preferred to say it — Pale Male.”
