Mary Winn, the author who chronicled the bird sensation Male, a red-tailed hawk that took up residence on the roof of an Upper East Side apartment building only to be evicted in 2004, sparking protests from bird watchers who were thrilled to see it. The rat-attracting enthusiast died disemboweled on December 25. In Manhattan. She was 88 years old.
Her son, Michael Miller, confirmed her death at the hospital.
After publishing several books in the 1970s and 1980s about the changing nature of childhood, Ms. Wynn began writing a column about Mother Nature for the Wall Street Journal in 1989, a career shift that eventually put her at the sole center of attention. -New York City melodrama.
It began in Central Park, where Ms. Wynn began birdwatching in 1991, the year an unusual-looking red-tailed hawk arrived from places unknown.
Instead of the dark brown features that typically characterize red-tailed hawks, this bird had light-colored plumage. Ms. Wen named her inquisitive colleague a male Bali. She and the other Central Park birdwatchers—the “regulars,” Ms. Wynn calls them—followed him everywhere.
“Shortly after arriving in Central Park,” she wrote in Red-Tails in Love: A Wildlife Drama in Central Park (1998), “he discovered a male hunting ground that became his favorite: an area “near the park’s entrance on Avenue Fifth and 79th Street – Murder Corner, as the regulars called it.
Every day, a man fed a flock of pigeons. A pale man watched from the chimney.
“By looking down intently, the Pale Male would look for someone who was slower, more clumsy, and imperceptibly stupid,” Ms. Wen wrote. “Then it plummets down into that incredible descent that hawks call diving. Bingo.”
Paley Mel 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 overlooks Central Park, was once home to actress Mary Tyler Moore. Pale Male did most of his mating on the 12th floor promenade. He also sometimes vacationed at a nearby building on Woody Allen’s loft.
The Pale Male’s romantic life consumed Ms. Winn and “The Regulars,” naming his succession of girlfriends First Love, Chocolate, and Blue. Bird watchers sat on a bench outside the park with binoculars in front of them waiting for the action, shouting, “They’re doing it!” When they were doing it.
There was heartbreak too. First Love “ate a poisoned pigeon and died on the edge of the Metropolitan Museum,” Ms. Wen wrote in the Wall Street Journal. She added that Chocolate died in “a crash on the New Jersey Turnpike.”
But perhaps the most unfortunate event in the life of the Pall Mill occurred in December 2004, when the co-op board at 927 Fifth Avenue, fed up with rat corpses and bird droppings littering the building’s front sidewalk, voted to remove the Pall Mill’s nest, upending His life is turned upside down. Courting his new consort Lola.
Protests outside the building attracted national media attention.
“I forbid myself, Margot, from being obscene,” Mrs. Wynne said he said on National Public Radio“All things considered,” he told interviewer Margot Adler. “I’m so angry about this.”
So was Mary Tyler Moore.
“These birds 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 loved to talk about: a kinder, kinder world, a kinder, kinder world.” He’s gone now.
New York City residents expressed their dismay via a 2004 version of Twitter – Letters to the Editor.
“The Falcons were all about location, location, location: what was their view of the park, and what was our view of them,” Matthew Wells of Brooklyn wrote for the Times. “Like those who destroyed a landmark in the middle of the night, those responsible for destroying the nest at 927 Fifth Avenue demonstrated their disdain for the city they call home.”
A week later, in response to pressure from the National Audubon Society, the cooperative’s board reversed its decision. On the morning of December 28, workers removed a device that was preventing the hawks from landing.
“In no time at all, Pale Male and Lola had landed at the nest site,” Ms. Wynn wrote. “Later that afternoon, Lola was seen bringing a fresh twig to the nest.”
Marie Winerova was born on October 21, 1936 in Prague. Her father, Joseph Weiner, was a doctor. Her mother, Hanna Tausygova, was a lawyer and later a broadcaster. After immigrating to New York City in 1939, her parents changed their names to Joseph and Joan Wein.
Mary Wynn attended Radcliffe College and graduated from Columbia University’s School of General Studies in 1959. She became a freelance journalist, contributing articles to The Times and other publications.
She married director Alan Miller in 1961.
When they started a family, Mrs. Wynn 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 Beautiful Tops: A Story About Why People Do Different Kinds of Work” (1970); The Sick Book: Questions and Answers About Hiccups, Mumps, Sneezes, Shocks, and Other Things That Wrong with Us (1976).
In 1977, Ms. Wynn wrote “Extra Drugs: Television, Children, and Family” A social critique of the role of television in the home. The book was widely praised. Television critic Stephanie Harrington, writing in The Times Book Review, called it “a multiple warhead launched against the great American sucker.”
Ms. Wynn followed with Children Without Childhoods: Growing Up Too Fast in a World of Sex and Drugs (1983) and Additional Drug Chapter (1987), a sequel to her previous book.
She also translated works by Czech writers, including Vaclav Havel, the playwright and last president of Czechoslovakia.
Mrs. Wynn is survived by her son, Michael, by her husband. Another son, Stephen. and four grandchildren. Her sister, New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm, died in 2021.
A red-tailed hawk believed to be a male pallid was found sick near 927 Fifth Avenue in 2023 and died a short time later.
Ms. Wynn returned to nature writing in 2008 with “Central Park in the Dark: More Secrets of Urban Wildlife,” in which she wrote delightfully, reviewers said, about moths, cicadas and screech owls. She also reflected on how Pale Male became, in her opinion, “the first bird star.”
“Pale male – the very name was a crucial element in creating this falcon’s fame. “It just fell off the tongue,” she wrote. “People liked to say that – pale male.”