Marie Wynn is a writer who documented the red-tailed hawk, Pale Mer, who became an avian sensation. She took up residence in an apartment overhang on the Upper East Side, but was evicted in 2004 and was thrilled to see it. This sparked protests by bird watchers. A lover who courted a disemboweled rat died in Manhattan on December 25th. She was 88 years old.
Her death was confirmed at the hospital by her son, Michael Miller.
Ms. Wynn began writing a column about Mother Nature for the Wall Street Journal in 1989, after publishing several books in the 1970s and '80s about the changing nature of childhood. This was a turning point in his career, and he eventually became a central figure in Only In. -New York City soap opera.
It all started in Central Park, where Wynn started birdwatching in 1991, when a rare red-tailed hawk arrived from an unknown location.
Instead of the dark brown features common in red-tailed hawks, this individual had light-colored feathers. Wynn named the curious man Pale Male. She and other Central Park birdwatchers, “regulars” as Wynn calls them, followed him everywhere.
“As soon as I arrived in Central Park,” she wrote in her book Red Tails in Love: Central Park's Wildlife Drama (1998), The Murder Corner, as the regulars called it, was located near the park's entrance on Fifth Avenue and 79th Street. ”
There, a man would feed a flock of pigeons every day. A pale man was watching the scene from the chimney.
“Peering down, Pale Mail looked for a man who was invisibly slower, clumsier, and stupider,” Wynn wrote. “Then it's a breathtaking dive that falconers call a forward bend. Bingo.”
Pale Mail liked the area so much that she decided to settle at 927 Fifth Avenue, a 12-story luxury apartment building near the corner of East 74th Street. Actress Mary Tyler Moore also lived in this building with views of Central Park. Pale males did most of their mating on the 12th floor cornice. He sometimes vacationed in a building on the terrace of Woody Allen's penthouse nearby.
Ms. Wynn and her “regulars” became enamored with the romantic life of Pale Mail, naming one girlfriend after another First Love, Chocolate, and Blue. Birdwatchers sat on benches outside the park, holding binoculars and shouting, “They're doing it!” as they waited for action. when they were doing it.
There were also emotional scars. First Love “ate poisoned pigeons and died on a shelf at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” Wynn wrote in the Wall Street Journal. Chocolate died in a “collision on the New Jersey Turnpike,” she added.
But perhaps the most deplorable event in Pale Mail's life occurred in December 2004. At that time, the co-op board of directors at 927 Fifth Avenue, fed up with dead rats and bird droppings on the sidewalk in front of the building, voted to remove Pale Mail's nest. It turned my life upside down. Courtship of his new spouse Laura.
The protest outside the building attracted national media attention.
“Margot, I try not to be lewd,” Ms. Wynn told interviewer Margot Adler on NPR's “All Things Considered.” “I'm very 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: It's gone now. ”
New York City residents expressed their disappointment through the 2004 version of Twitter, a letter to the editor.
Brooklyn resident Matthew Wills told the Times that the hawks were “all about location, location, location. What a great view they had from the park, and what a great view we had from them.” “Taka,” he wrote in the Times. “Like those who vandalize landmarks in the middle of the night, those responsible for destroying the nest at 927 Fifth Avenue demonstrate their disdain 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 the landing device that was preventing the hawks from landing.
“Pale Mail and Lola landed on the nest site in no time,” Wynn wrote. “Later that afternoon, Lola was seen carrying new twigs to the nest.”
Marie Wienerová was born on October 21, 1936 in Prague. Her father, Josef Wiener, was a doctor. Her mother, Hanna Tausigova, was a lawyer and later became a broadcaster. After moving to New York City in 1939, his parents changed their names to Joseph and Joan Wynn.
Marie 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 film director Alan Miller in 1961.
After starting a family, Wynn began publishing books for young readers. “The Man Who Made Fine Tops: Stories about Why People Do Different Types of Work” (1970). and “The Sick Book: Q&A about hiccups, mumps, sneezing, mumbling, and other things that bother us'' (1976).
In 1977, Ms. Wynn wrote “Plug-in 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 “multiple warheads fired against a great American pacifist.”
Ms. Wynn went on to write Children Without a Childhood: Growing Up Too Fast in a World of Sex and Drugs (1983) and a sequel to her earlier book, Unplugging the Plug-in Drug (1987). ) was published.
She also translated the works of Czech writers, including Vaclav Havel, the playwright and last president of Czechoslovakia.
Wynn is survived by her husband, along with her son Michael. another son, Stephen; and four grandchildren. Her sister, New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm, passed away in 2021.
In 2023, a red-tailed hawk, believed to be a pale male, was found sick near 927 Fifth Avenue and died shortly after.
Ms. Wynn returned to nature writing in 2008 with “Central Park in the Dark: The Further Mysteries of Urban Wildlife,'' and reviewers said she enjoyed writing about moths, cicadas and screech owls. She also reflected on how Pale Male became, in her opinion, “the first avian superstar.”
“Pale Male — that very name was a key element in creating this hawk's celebrity. It tripped off the tongue,” she wrote. “That's what people liked to say – Pale Mail.”
