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Tampa Bay's 'Bird Man' once soared high, now crashes to earth amid charges

 
Ducks waddle in the warehouse where state wildlife officers found feces, feathers and rotting fruit all around.
Ducks waddle in the warehouse where state wildlife officers found feces, feathers and rotting fruit all around.
Published June 19, 2016

Once upon a time, Ralph Heath Jr. was a legend: the Bird Man of Tampa Bay.

Starting with one cormorant in 1971, Heath eventually ran the largest nonprofit wild bird hospital and sanctuary in the United States. At the height of his fame, more than 50,000 people a year visited his Suncoast Seabird Sanctuary in Indian Shores, marveling at how he and his staff rehabilitated injured pelicans and other creatures. He even had his own ocean-going research vessel.

Now the ship is in mothballs. The people who run the sanctuary he started are changing the locks to keep him out. He faces numerous misdemeanor charges over keeping turtles and birds in a Largo warehouse where state officials found rotting fruit, feathers and feces all over the floor.

Heath's attorney says that what needs rehabilitating now is Heath's reputation.

Heath contends he is the target of a conspiracy. Former employees want to supplant him, he said in an interview. Developers want his beachfront land for condominiums. Petty bureaucrats who care more about paperwork than the lives of birds tied him up with red tape.

Heath said he believes injured birds seek him out for help. In a 90-minute interview with the Tampa Bay Times, he said he has been told by a Seminole chief that he has "an aura, like radar" that birds sense, knowing he's a friend who can cure their ills. Perhaps they even "communicate with each other" about him, he said.

Heath's attorney, Kevin Doty, warned him that if the Times printed that, "they're going to come after you with a net."

"Well, it happens to be true," Heath replied. "As long as the birds love me and come to me for help, I don't care what other people say."

• • •

To Vernon Yates, a veteran wildlife rehabilitation expert who has known Heath for decades, there's a simple explanation for Heath's woes, summed up by a number: 70. That's how old Heath is now. He'll be 71 next month.

"He's got to understand he can't do this no more," said Yates, who credits Heath with inspiring him to launch his Wildlife Rescue and Rehabilitation in Seminole in 1980. "He's too old. I see a man who's gotten older and his brain is slowing down."

Heath's legal trouble frightens Yates, who is 63. Yates worries about sliding into some similar disaster. Yet stopping, or even slowing down, seems unthinkable, because there are no younger people coming along to take over the business.

"Nobody is stupid enough," he explained. "You're not going to find another idiot who's willing to work at this 24-7 the way we did. That's why I've been married five times. When the phone rings, you've got to go."

• • •

When Heath was growing up, he had a spider monkey that climbed the dining room shelves and a 6-foot caiman that filled a bathtub. He talked about birds so much that his friends at St. Petersburg's Dixie Hollins High School dubbed him "Birdman," said Kenneth City Council member Carl Troup, a pal since childhood.

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Heath watched closely as his father, a prominent Tampa surgeon, worked on patients. He learned to do stitches before he left elementary school, he said. He spent seven years in college, studying to be a doctor, an actor, a theologian. Nothing excited him.

"Do what makes you happy," his father told Heath, an only child. "If you want to be a beachcomber, be a good beachcomber."

After at last earning a zoology degree, Heath decided to become, as he put it in a 2010 radio interview, "a well-educated beach bum." He collected driftwood to make lamps.

One December day in 1971, as he was leaving his family's beach house on Gulf Boulevard in Indian Shores to go Christmas shopping, he spotted a cormorant with a broken wing. The bird, so graceful when diving into the water for fish, was wandering dangerously close to the busy road.

He coaxed it over, caught it, put it in his car and drove to a veterinarian's office. The vet put a metal pin in the bird's wing, then told Heath, "Okay, now it's up to you."

Heath took the bird home and put it in a cage in a quiet area where it could heal. He called a nearby fishing pier to see if he could get some fish to feed his patient. The next thing he knew, the pier manager was calling back, seeking help with an injured gull.

After that, word spread quickly. Once local police and fire departments found out he would take care of injured wildlife, the birds started coming to him daily, Heath recalled.

A bum no more, Heath turned the family's beach property into an animal hospital and sanctuary. His parents, glad Heath had at last found his purpose, backed him. His father, after retiring, personally greeted every visitor to the sanctuary until his death in 1986. His mother worked in the sanctuary office 50 hours a week until she was 103. She died in 2014 at 104.

On the surface, the sanctuary was a smashing success, garnering attention from the New York Times, Smithsonian magazine and the Today show. Behind the scenes, though, there were intimations of something darker.

• • •

At the height of Heath's fame, WFLA-TV ran a story suggesting that Heath was using his research vessel for parties with naked women, not protecting wildlife. That failed to dent the sanctuary's popularity.

He has had to battle other opponents. Residents of the adjacent Beach Cottages condominiums have over the years complained about nasty odors, improper irrigation and septic systems, and other problems.

At some point, some on Heath's staff concluded he was behaving less like a humanitarian and more like a hoarder. If he saw an injured bird in the sanctuary that interested him, "he would just gather them up and take them, with hospital staff never knowing what their outcome was," said former staffer Crystal Durnam.

Heath says he did that only when he saw an animal in need of greater medical attention than it was getting.

He never wanted to euthanize injured animals, even when others insisted it was the most humane option. He kept some birds at his home as pets — a Muscovy duck, for one — and when they died he put them in his freezer, unable to part with them right away.

"He feels like he owns the birds," the sanctuary's current office manager, Kim Kraut, explained. "They're his. They belong to him."

In addition to the sanctuary and his house on the same property, Heath was keeping animals in the Largo building that a WFLA report recently dubbed the "Warehouse of Horrors." He would transfer wildlife between the warehouse and sanctuary, and birds coming from the warehouse were often in very bad shape, Durnam said.

But staff also knew questioning Heath meant being fired on the spot because, she said, "he … told us numerous times that as far as we were concerned, he was God."

By 2012, Heath seemed a lot less godlike. The sanctuary kept missing payrolls. The electricity was briefly cut off for nonpayment. The IRS filed liens totaling $187,726 for unpaid payroll taxes (he's now on a payment plan). A year later — after his mother stopped running the office — he was charged with worker's compensation fraud.

Because it was his first felony, a judge put him into a pretrial intervention program and withheld a formal finding of guilt. Then in 2014, state wildlife officers charged him with 59 misdemeanors over the way the sanctuary was caring for its wildlife. Some of it was a matter of the proper paperwork, but some was related to keeping animals in unsanitary conditions.

This time he got probation, yet somehow held onto his state permits for keeping animals — permits that he may now lose, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.

"As with any case of this nature, the FWC is reviewing Mr. Heath's captive wildlife permits for possible revocation," wildlife commission spokesman Rob Klepper said.

The 2014 charges led to a change in the sanctuary's management, with the people now in charge working to keep Heath out and applying for separate permits, said Kraut, the current office manager. They've even scrubbed his name from its website.

"Ralph doesn't have anything to do with the sanctuary now," she said. "We've been fighting him for years."

Yet it's his permits that have allowed the sanctuary to keep operating.

• • •

An anonymous tip led Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation investigators to the Largo warehouse last month. They could not enter some rooms without hazmat suits. The rest were nearly that filthy.

Heath said he had lost two helpers who had assisted him and he was having difficulty dealing with all the animals alone. He said the officers initially told him he would have time to improve conditions, but then they came back and handed him a bunch of citations.

They cited Heath for possessing migratory birds with an expired license, trying to rehabilitate injured wildlife in an unapproved location and possessing box turtles without a permit. Heath said he has had some of those turtles for 60 years.

In last week's interview, every time he was asked what he would do if state officials rescind his wildlife permits, Heath expressed confidence that he would win in court, triumphing over all his many adversaries. Then he can continue caring for the birds who seek him out.

He knows people are whispering that he's lost his mind. He doesn't care.

"They say I'm crazy," he said. "Are the birds crazy for walking up to me?"

Times researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report. Contact Craig Pittman at craig@tampabay.com. Follow @craigtimes.