When Ronald Galotti was running magazines at Condé Nast, he was used to entertaining the likes of Linda Evangelista and Gianni Versace.

That was then.

Now, the company he keeps is a little different.

One recent morning, he and his wife, Lisa Galotti, woke up at their farmhouse in North Pomfret, Vt., to find an unexpected guest fluttering around their fireplace.

“It’s a baby hawk,” Mr. Galotti said to his wife. “He must have come down the chimney. Get me a towel.”

So she did. At which point, he pulled the bird out of the fireplace, let out a choice expletive as it tried to take a bite of his index finger, and continued with a tour of the property.

In the 1990s, Mr. Galotti was arguably the best-known magazine publisher in America, the guy who had helped build up Vanity Fair and Vogue. Granted, that role does not generally bring the same fame as editing those titles can, but it was not as if Graydon Carter had served as the inspiration for Mr. Big, the highflying, limousine-riding, sometime paramour of Carrie Bradshaw in “Sex and The City.”

Mr. Galotti had.