She chronicled the melodrama of Pale Male, a red-tailed hawk who became an avian sensation as it took up residence atop a Manhattan apartment building.
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 had been 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.”