Marie Winn, the author who chronicled the avian sensation Pale Male, a red-tailed hawk that took up residence on the overhang of an Upper East Side apartment building only to be evicted in 2004, sparking protests by birders who were thrilled to watch him woo lovers with disemboweled rats, died on Dec. 25 in Manhattan. She was 88.
Her death, at a hospital, was confirmed by her son Michael Miller.
After publishing several books in the 1970s and ’80s about the changing nature of childhood, Ms. Winn began writing a column on mother nature for The Wall Street Journal in 1989, a career turn that eventually put her at the center of an only-in-New-York-City melodrama.
It began in Central Park, where Ms. Winn started bird watching in 1991, the year an unusual-looking red-tailed hawk arrived from places unknown.
Instead of the dark brown features that typically mark red-tail hawks, this one had light-colored plumage. Ms. Winn named the curious fellow Pale Male. She and other bird watchers of Central Park — “the Regulars,” as Ms. Winn called them — followed him everywhere.
“Shortly after his arrival in Central Park,” she wrote in her book “Red-Tails in Love: A Wildlife Drama in Central Park” (1998), “Pale Male had discovered a hunting ground that was to become his favorite: an area near the park entrance at Fifth Avenue and 79th Street — the killing corner, as the Regulars dubbed it.”
Every day, a man fed a flock of pigeons there. Pale Male watched from a chimney.
“Peering down intently, Pale Male would search out one that was imperceptibly slower, clumsier, stupider,” Ms. Winn wrote. “Then he would plummet down in that breathtaking dive falconers call a stoop. Bingo.”
Pale Male liked the neighborhood so much that he decided to settle at 927 Fifth Avenue, a 12-story luxury apartment building near the corner of East 74th Street. The building, which has a view of Central Park, was also home to the actress Mary Tyler Moore. Pale Male did most of his mating on the 12th-floor cornice. He also occasionally vacationed at a building nearby, on Woody Allen’s penthouse terrace.
Ms. Winn and “the Regulars” were consumed by Pale Male’s romantic life, naming his succession of girlfriends First Love, Chocolate and Blue. The birders sat on a bench outside the park with binoculars waiting for action, shouting, “They’re doing it!” when they were 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 Street Journal. Chocolate, she added, died in “a collision on the New Jersey Turnpike.”
But perhaps the most lamentable event in Pale Male’s life occurred in December 2004, when the co-op board at 927 Fifth Avenue, fed up with rat carcasses and bird droppings falling to the building’s front sidewalk, voted to remove Pale Male’s nest, upending his courtship of his new consort, Lola.
Protests outside the building attracted national media attention.
“I’m restraining myself, Margot, from being obscene,” Ms. Winn said on NPR’s “All Things Considered,” addressing the interviewer, Margot Adler. “I’m so angry about this.”
So was Mary Tyler Moore.
“These birds just kept coming back to the edge of the building, and people kept coming back to see them,” she told The New York Times, adding, “This was something we like to talk about: a kinder, gentler world, and now it’s gone.”
New York City residents expressed their dismay via the 2004 version of Twitter — letters to the editor.
The hawks were “all about location, location, location: what a view they had of the park, and what a view we had of them,” Matthew Wills of Brooklyn wrote to The Times. “Like those who destroy a landmark in the middle of the night, those responsible for destroying the nest at 927 Fifth Avenue have shown their contempt for the city they call home.”
A week later, in response to pressure from the National Audubon Society, the co-op board reversed its decision. On the morning of Dec. 28, workers removed an apparatus on the landing that had prevented the hawks from alighting.
“In no time at all Pale Male and Lola landed on the nest site,” Ms. Winn wrote. “Later that afternoon Lola was seen bringing a new twig to the nest.”
Marie Wienerova was born on Oct. 21, 1936, in Prague. Her father, Josef Wiener, was a doctor. Her mother, Hanna Taussigova, was a lawyer and later a broadcaster. After emigrating to New York City in 1936, her parents changed their names to Joseph and Joan Winn.
Marie Winn attended Radcliffe College and graduated from the University of Columbia School of General Studies in 1959. She became a freelance journalist, contributing articles to The Times and other publications.
She married Allan Miller, a filmmaker, in 1961.
As they started a family, Ms. Winn began publishing books for young readers, including “The Fireside Book of Children’s Songs” (1966), for which her husband wrote the musical arrangements; “The Man Who Made Fine Tops: A Story About Why People Do Different Kinds of Work” (1970); and “The Sick Book: Questions and Answers About Hiccups and Mumps, Sneezes and Bumps, and Other Things That Go Wrong with Us” (1976).
In 1977, Ms. Winn wrote “The Plug-in Drug: Television, Children and the Family,” a social critique about TV’s role in the home. The book was widely praised. Writing in The Times Book Review, the television critic Stephanie Harrington called it a “multiple warhead launched against the great American pacifier.”
Ms. Winn followed with “Children Without Childhood: Growing Up Too Fast in the World of Sex and Drugs” (1983) and “Unplugging the Plug-in Drug” (1987), a sequel to her earlier book.
She also translated works by Czech writers, including Vaclav Havel, the playwright and last president of Czechoslovakia.
Along with her son Michael, Ms. Winn is survived by her husband; another son, Steven; and four grandchildren. Her sister, The New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm, died in 2021.
A red-tailed hawk believed to be Pale Male was found sick not far from 927 Fifth Avenue in 2023 and died a short time later.
Ms. Winn returned to nature writing in 2008 with “Central Park in the Dark: More Mysteries of Urban Wildlife,” writing delightfully, reviewers said, about moths, cicadas and screech owls. She also reflected on how Pale Male had became, in her opinion, “the first avian superstar.”
“Pale Male — the very name was a crucial ingredient in creating this hawk’s celebrity. It fell trippingly from the tongue,” she wrote. “People liked to say it — Pale Male.”
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