Culture
Marie Winn, Who Wrote of a Famous Central Park Hawk, Dies at 88
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.”
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 1939, 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.”
Let’s memorize a poem! Not because it’s good for us or because we think we should, but because it’s fun, a mental challenge with a solid aesthetic reward. You can amuse yourself, impress your friends and maybe discover that your way of thinking about the world — or even, as you’ll see, the universe — has shifted a bit.
Over the next five days, we’ll look closely at a great poem by one of our favorite poets, and we’ll have games, readings and lots of encouragement to help you learn it by heart. Some of you know how this works: Last year more Times readers than we could count memorized a jaunty 18-line recap of an all-night ferry ride. (If you missed that adventure, it’s not too late to embark. The ticket is still valid.)
This time, we’re training our telescopes on W.H. Auden’s “The More Loving One” — a clever, compact meditation on love, disappointment and the night sky.
Here’s the first of its four stanzas, read for us by Matthew McConaughey:
The More Loving One
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
Matthew McConaughey, actor and poet
In four short lines we get a brisk, cynical tour of the universe: hell and the heavens, people and animals, coldness and cruelty. Commonplace observations — that the stars are distant; that life can be dangerous — are wound into a charming, provocative insight. The tone is conversational, mixing decorum and mild profanity in a manner that makes it a pleasure to keep reading.
Here’s Tracy K. Smith, a former U.S. poet laureate, with the second stanza:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Tracy K. Smith, poet
These lines abruptly shift the focus from astronomy to love, from the universal to the personal. Imagine how it would feel if the stars had massive, unrequited crushes on us! The speaker, couching his skepticism in a coy, hypothetical question, seems certain that we wouldn’t like this at all.
This certainty leads him to a remarkable confession, a moment of startling vulnerability. The poem’s title, “The More Loving One,” is restated with sweet, disarming frankness. Our friend is wearing his heart on his well-tailored sleeve.
The poem could end right there: two stanzas, point and counterpoint, about how we appreciate the stars in spite of their indifference because we would rather love than be loved.
But the third stanza takes it all back. Here’s Alison Bechdel reading it:
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Alison Bechdel, graphic novelist
The speaker downgrades his foolish devotion to qualified admiration. No sooner has he established himself as “the more loving one” than he gives us — and perhaps himself — reason to doubt his ardor. He likes the stars fine, he guesses, but not so much as to think about them when they aren’t around.
The fourth and final stanza, read by Yiyun Li, takes this disenchantment even further:
Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.
Yiyun Li, author
Wounded defiance gives way to a more rueful, resigned state of mind. If the universe were to snuff out its lights entirely, the speaker reckons he would find beauty in the void. A starless sky would make him just as happy.
Though perhaps, like so many spurned lovers before and after, he protests a little too much. Every fan of popular music knows that a song about how you don’t care that your baby left you is usually saying the opposite.
The last line puts a brave face on heartbreak.
So there you have it. In just 16 lines, this poem manages to be somber and funny, transparent and elusive. But there’s more to it than that. There is, for one thing, a voice — a thinking, feeling person behind those lines.
When he wrote “The More Loving One,” in the 1950s, Wystan Hugh Auden was among the most beloved writers in the English-speaking world. Before this week is over there will be more to say about Auden, but like most poets he would have preferred that we give our primary attention to the poem.
Its structure is straightforward and ingenious. Each of the four stanzas is virtually a poem unto itself — a complete thought expressed in one or two sentences tied up in a neat pair of couplets. Every quatrain is a concise, witty observation: what literary scholars call an epigram.
This makes the work of memorization seem less daunting. We can take “The More Loving One” one epigram at a time, marvelling at how the four add up to something stranger, deeper and more complex than might first appear.
So let’s go back to the beginning and try to memorize that insouciant, knowing first stanza. Below you’ll find a game we made to get you started. Give it a shot, and come back tomorrow for more!
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.
Your first task: Learn the first four lines!
Let’s start with the first couplet. Fill in the rhyming words.
Monday
Love, the cosmos and everything in between, all in 16 lines.
Tuesday (Available tomorrow)
What’s love got to do with it?
Wednesday (Available April 22)
How to write about love? Be a little heartsick (and the best poet of your time).
Thursday (Available April 23)
Are we alone in the universe? Does it matter?
Friday (Available April 24)
You did it! You’re a star.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
Literature
‘Romola’ (1863) by George Eliot
Who knew that there’s a major George Eliot novel that neither I nor any of my friends had ever heard of?
“Romola” was Eliot’s fourth novel, published between “The Mill on the Floss” (1860) and “Middlemarch” (1870-71). If my friends and I didn’t get this particular memo, and “Romola” is familiar to every Eliot fan but us, please skip the following.
“Romola” isn’t some fluky misfire better left unmentioned in light of Eliot’s greater work. It’s her only historical novel, set in Florence during the Italian Renaissance. It embraces big subjects like power, religion, art and social upheaval, but it’s not dry or overly intellectual. Its central character is a gifted, freethinking young woman named Romola, who enters a marriage so disastrous as to make Anna Karenina’s look relatively good.
It probably matters that many of Eliot’s other books have been adapted into movies or TV series, with actors like Hugh Dancy, Ben Kingsley, Emily Watson and Rufus Sewell. The BBC may be doing even more than we thought to keep classic literature alive. (In 1924, “Romola” was made into a silent movie starring Lillian Gish. It doesn’t seem to have made much difference.)
Anthony Trollope, among others, loved “Romola.” He did, however, warn Eliot against aiming over her readers’ heads, which may help explain its obscurity.
All I can say, really, is that it’s a mystery why some great books stay with us and others don’t.
‘Quiet Dell’ (2013) by Jayne Anne Phillips
This was an Oprah Book of the Week, which probably disqualifies it from B-side status, but it’s not nearly as well known as Phillips’s debut story collection, “Black Tickets” (1979), or her most recent novel, “Night Watch” (2023), which won her a long-overdue Pulitzer Prize.
Phillips has no parallel in her use of potent, stylized language to shine a light into the darkest of corners. In “Quiet Dell,” her only true-crime novel, she’s at the height of her powers, which are particularly apparent when she aims her language laser at horrific events that actually occurred. Her gift for transforming skeevy little lives into what I can only call “Blade Runner” mythology is consistently stunning.
Consider this passage from the opening chapter of “Quiet Dell”:
“Up high the bells are ringing for everyone alive. There are silver and gold and glass bells you can see through, and sleigh bells a hundred years old. My grandmother said there was a whisper for each one dead that year, and a feather drifting for each one waiting to be born.”
The book is full of language like that — and of complex, often chillingly perverse characters. It’s a dark, underrecognized beauty.
‘Solaris’ (1961) by Stanislaw Lem
You could argue that, in America, at least, the Polish writer Stanislaw Lem didn’t produce any A-side novels. You could just as easily argue that that makes all his novels both A-side and B-side.
It’s science fiction. All right?
I love science and speculative fiction, but I know a lot of literary types who take pride in their utter lack of interest in it. I always urge those people to read “Solaris,” which might change their opinions about a vast number of popular books they dismiss as trivial. As far as I know, no one has yet taken me up on that.
“Solaris” involves the crew of a space station continuing the study of an aquatic planet that has long defied analysis by the astrophysicists of Earth. Part of what sets the book apart from a lot of other science-fiction novels is Lem’s respect for enigma. He doesn’t offer contrived explanations in an attempt to seduce readers into suspending disbelief. The crew members start to experience … manifestations? … drawn from their lives and memories. If the planet has any intentions, however, they remain mysterious. All anyone can tell is that their desires and their fears, some of which are summoned from their subconsciousness, are being received and reflected back to them so vividly that it becomes difficult to tell the real from the projected. “Solaris” has the peculiar distinction of having been made into not one but two bad movies. Read the book instead.
‘Fox 8’ (2013) by George Saunders
If one of the most significant living American writers had become hypervisible with his 2017 novel, “Lincoln in the Bardo,” we’d go back and read his earlier work, wouldn’t we? Yes, and we may very well have already done so with the story collections “Tenth of December” (2013) and “Pastoralia” (2000). But what if we hadn’t yet read Saunders’s 2013 novella, “Fox 8,” about an unusually intelligent fox who, by listening to a family from outside their windows at night, has learned to understand, and write, in fox-English?: “One day, walking neer one of your Yuman houses, smelling all the interest with snout, I herd, from inside, the most amazing sound. Turns out, what that sound is, was: the Yuman voice, making werds. They sounded grate! They sounded like prety music! I listened to those music werds until the sun went down.”
Once Saunders became more visible to more of us, we’d want to read a book that ventures into the consciousness of a different species (novels tend to be about human beings), that maps the differences and the overlaps in human and animal consciousness, explores the effects of language on consciousness and is great fun.
We’d all have read it by now — right?
‘Between the Acts’ (1941) by Virginia Woolf
You could argue that Woolf didn’t have any B-sides, and yet it’s hard to deny that more people have read “Mrs. Dalloway” (1925) and “To the Lighthouse” (1927) than have read “The Voyage Out” (1915) or “Monday or Tuesday” (1921). Those, along with “Orlando” (1928) and “The Waves” (1931), are Woolf’s most prominent novels.
Four momentous novels is a considerable number for any writer, even a great one. That said, “Between the Acts,” her last novel, really should be considered the fifth of her significant books. The phrase “embarrassment of riches” comes to mind.
Five great novels by the same author is a lot for any reader to take on. Our reading time is finite. We won’t live long enough to read all the important books, no matter how old we get to be. I don’t expect many readers to be as devoted to Woolf as are the cohort of us who consider her to have been some sort of dark saint of literature and will snatch up any relic we can find. Fanatics like me will have read “Between the Acts” as well as “The Voyage Out,” “Monday or Tuesday” and “Flush” (1933), the story of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel. Speaking for myself, I don’t blame anyone who hasn’t gotten to those.
I merely want to add “Between the Acts” to the A-side, lest anyone who’s either new to Woolf or a tourist in Woolf-landia fail to rank it along with the other four contenders.
As briefly as possible: It focuses on an annual village pageant that attempts to convey all of English history in a single evening. The pageant itself interweaves subtly, brilliantly, with the lives of the villagers playing the parts.
It’s one of Woolf’s most lusciously lyrical novels. And it’s a crash course, of sorts, in her genius for conjuring worlds in which the molehill matters as much as the mountain, never mind their differences in size.
It’s also the most accessible of her greatest books. It could work for some as an entry point, in more or less the way William Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying” (1930) can be the starter book before you go on to “The Sound and the Fury” (1929) or “Absalom, Absalom!” (1936).
As noted, there’s too much for us to read. We do the best we can.
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Literature
‘Prayer’ (1985) by Galway Kinnell
Whatever happens. Whatever
what is is is what
I want. Only that. But that.
“I typically say Kinnell’s words at the start of my day, as I’m pedaling a traffic-laden path to my office,” says Major Jackson, 57, the author of six books of poetry, including “Razzle Dazzle” (2023). “The poem encourages a calm acceptance of the day’s events but also wants us to embrace the misapprehension and oblivion of life, to avoid probing too deeply for answers to inscrutable questions. I admire what Kinnell does with only 14 words; the repetition of ‘what,’ ‘that’ and ‘is’ would seem to limit the poem’s sentiment but, paradoxically, the poem opens widely to contain all manner of human experience. The three ‘is’es in the middle line give it a symmetry that makes its message feel part of a natural order, and even more convincing. Thanks to the skillful punctuation, pauses and staccato rhythm, a tonal quality of interior reflection emerges. Much like a haiku, it continues after its last words, lingering like the last note played on a piano that slowly fades.”
“Just as I was entering young adulthood, probably slow to claim romantic feelings, a girlfriend copied out a poem by Pablo Neruda and slipped it into an envelope with red lipstick kisses all over it. In turn, I recited this poem. It took me the remainder of that winter to memorize its lines,” says Jackson. “The poem captures the pitch of longing that defines love at its most intense. The speaker in Shakespeare’s most famous sonnet believes the poem creates the beloved, ‘So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.’ (Sonnet 18). In Rilke’s expressive declarations of yearning, the beloved remains elusive. Wherever the speaker looks or travels, she marks his world by her absence. I find this deeply moving.”
“Clifton faced many obstacles, including cancer, a kidney transplant and the loss of her husband and two of her children. Through it all, she crafted a long career as a pre-eminent American poet,” says Jackson. “Her poem ‘won’t you celebrate with me’ is a war cry, an invitation to share in her victories against life’s persistent challenges. The poem is meaningful to all who have had to stare down death in a hospital or had to bereave the passing of close relations. But, even for those who have yet to mourn life’s vicissitudes, the poem is instructive in cultivating resilience and a persevering attitude. I keep coming back to the image of the speaker’s hands and the spirit of steadying oneself in the face of unspeakable storms. She asks in a perfectly attuned gorgeously metrical line, ‘what did i see to be except myself?’”
‘Sonnet 94’ (1609) by William Shakespeare
They that have power to hurt and will do none,
That do not do the thing they most do show,
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
Unmovèd, cold, and to temptation slow,
They rightly do inherit heaven’s graces
And husband nature’s riches from expense;
They are the lords and owners of their faces,
Others but stewards of their excellence.
The summer’s flower is to the summer sweet,
Though to itself it only live and die;
But if that flower with base infection meet,
The basest weed outbraves his dignity.
For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.
“It’s one of the moments of Western consciousness,” says Frederick Seidel, 90, the author of more than a dozen collections of poetry, including “So What” (2024). “Shakespeare knows and says what he knows.”
“It trombones magnificent, unbearable sorrow,” says Seidel.
“It’s smartass and bitter and bright,” says Seidel.
These interviews have been edited and condensed.
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