Sunshine State

by Sarah Gerard

  “I felt that because my upbringing was so privileged,” Ralph told me. “I said, ‘Well, I’m going to dedicate my life to those who are less fortunate, in the bird category.’”

  The rest is now history.

  The first time I interviewed Ralph, I asked him what he’s learned over all his years working with birds. “Probably the interesting thing that I have learned about birds by working on them so long,” he told me, “is that they’re an animal, or they . . . I guess I shouldn’t call them an animal—they’re a wildlife object169 that, you know, take a long time to bond to you. In other words, birds take a long time to bond to you as opposed to, say, a dog or a cat. And the interesting thing about birds is that once they bond to you, it’s like a permanent bond. In other words, they’ll love you for the rest of their life.”

  Birds he’s known since they hatched, that are sick, will wait until he’s home to die in his hands. If he’s sitting in his bedroom doing paperwork, certain pigeons and doves that are free-flying in his house will come and sit in bed with him.

  Jimbo sees Ralph’s relationship with animals in a slightly different light. On the phone he told me, “Every day that I wake up in that house, I have to swipe away some spider webs to get out of my room.170 I’m not allowed to clean them because we don’t have a proper home for the ‘little spideys.’ It’s terrible. It’s a terrible thing.”

  Jimbo had been living in Ralph’s house for five months at that point, helping him pack for the move to the warehouse. He had packed everything but the birds and had done his best to clean the house and the yard as far as Ralph would let him. Ralph’s sons had paid him to clear out a space in the warehouse in which Ralph could live comfortably. But as soon as Jimbo had cleared some room, Ralph filled it up again with furniture picked from the side of the road.

  According to Jimbo, the warehouse is piled high with furniture, some roadside finds and some inherited. Micki had told me that among the furniture in the warehouse is some taken from an apartment that once belonged to Tara Gallagher, a former girlfriend of Ralph’s and employee of the sanctuary171 who died in a drunken accident in 2010. It’s not uncommon for Ralph to forage in the sanctuary’s trash cans172 late at night, looking for things to salvage.

  “‘We can save that broken rattan sofa and one day we’ll need it for one of our guests to sleep on!’” Jimbo said, imitating Ralph. “It’s so beyond full, it’s ridiculous.”

  He paused for a moment. “His heart is pure,” he said finally, beginning to cry. “His thoughts about what is in the best bird interest is pure. He’s still the best on-the-spot bird doctor there is. He’s got these weird potions—who knows what’s in it, but they fix everybody. He’s fucking amazing.”

  I asked Jimbo whether anyone had thought to consult a psychiatrist. Ralph refuses, he said. “He will not for a moment adhere to the idea that he has a problem. No. He don’t get it.”

  I asked if he was concerned about what would happen to Ralph once he moved into the warehouse. This is the place where he indulges himself, after all, and the results weren’t exactly healthy.

  “No,” he said. He wasn’t worried. “Ralph’s going to die from whatever he dies from . . . in any place.”

  Spending enough time with Ralph, one will notice that he coughs a lot, but he doesn’t smoke. In fact, he hates smoking—he told me this many times. When he was six, his father showed him what happens to smokers.

  “Those were the days when a doctor could walk out of a hospital with any body part he wanted,” he told me on the phone. We spoke for thirty minutes as I sat outside a café in my father’s car. Fifteen minutes after we hung up, Ralph called me back to tell me the story of Grungy, the orphaned pigeon173 who saved his life one night. Then he segued into this one about his father.

  Ralph Sr. died in 1986. He was something of a legend around Tampa, if one believes his son. He hovers in the background of the history of the sanctuary like a ghost; stalks around the perimeter, quietly watching, silently approving of Ralph’s work. Ralph Jr. still has turtles that his father helped him put back together fifty years ago. Hearing Ralph talk about him is like hearing a Bruce Springsteen fan letter read aloud.

  Once, Ralph’s father had come home with a package wrapped in newspaper. He laid it on the walkway in front of Ralph’s childhood home, now the sanctuary office. He told Ralph to unwrap the package. Ralph obeyed.

  “And okay,” Ralph said. “It’s half of a human lung.”

  Ralph tells this story with great excitement and a certain filial pride. He has a knack for telling the same stories over and over with equal enthusiasm. He has many stories about his father.

  Ralph’s father handed him a scalpel, and Ralph opened the lung.

  “The only way I can describe it to you,” he told me, “it looked like an old Georgia asphalt road inside.”

  He has never tried a cigarette.

  Birds, especially pigeons, are linked to a slew of human illnesses.174 Most of them affect the respiratory system. Bird fancier’s lung is one of the most common.175 It’s associated with long-term or intense exposure to bird feathers and droppings. It causes what’s described as a “ground glass” appearance of the lungs so that they appear jagged and milky on X-rays. It also causes shortness of breath and a dry cough. Other bird-linked illnesses, such as cryptococcal meningitis, affect the brain.176 It was thought that Micki Eslick’s husband, Slick, had early-onset Alzheimer’s until a spinal tap showed it wasn’t that, but rather cryptococcal meningitis.177 He can no longer spend any time around birds.

  In August 2012, Robin Vergara, a sanctuary employee, sent an email to Ralph’s sons that warned them of the trouble the sanctuary was facing. “Birds are dying at an alarming rate,”178 it read. “Bird enclosures are decaying at a fast rate and there are no funds for repair.” It spoke of a lack of trust between staff and management, and of the increasing difficulty of maintaining donors.

  Attached to the email was a video outlining Robin’s action plan for repairing the sanctuary, “Wings of Change: A Win-Win for All.”179 He had worked with Philadelphia-based marketing guru and radio personality Mel “Toxic” Taylor to come up with the plan. Among its many points was the necessity of finding new management and clearing the sanctuary of bad press.

  “We know hurricane season just started,” Taylor says in “Wings of Change.” “Extra warm waters this season. Are we ready to evacuate? That warehouse, is it available?” Earlier in the year, the Tampa Bay Times had reported that the sanctuary had received a $100,000 donation from the Embassy of Qatar180 to help construct hurricane resources. The sanctuary could have used the donated money to buy generators for the warehouse and repair the damage to its structure. Instead, Micki informed Robin via email that there was no warehouse that could accommodate birds181 in the case of an emergency. “At this time we don’t have a warehouse to house the birds and that is something that Ralph is working on,” she wrote. A new warehouse never materialized,182 nor did space in the existing warehouse, nor the generators, nor a plan for evacuation—nor an accounting of how the money was used. It seemed to have just disappeared.

  “If a major storm would have hit that summer, it would have been a disaster like no other,”183 Robin told me via email. Among the concerns listed in his email to Ralph’s sons, he included this lack of an evacuation plan. Ralph’s sons never responded.

  Fed up, Robin finally left to open his own bird sanctuary,184 the Gulf Coast Bird Rescue, in partnership with the county and the school board—partnerships that weren’t easy to secure, according to him. It took a lot of time and effort, and careful planning, to convince those in power that the people behind Gulf Coast Bird Rescue were different from the people at the Suncoast Seabird Sanctuary. The scandals there had tainted the reputation of bird rescuers in general.

  In April 2014, Florida Fish and Wildlife carried out an inspection of the Suncoast Seabird Sanctuary, Ralph’s house, and the warehouse,185 responding to complaints that his animals were living in squal
or. What they found were birds “confined in unsanitary conditions”186 and injured wildlife that had not received care. They issued fifty-four violations for Ralph’s failure to maintain daily treatment and feeding logs for his birds. They issued two violations for rehabilitating migratory birds at an unapproved location. They issued one for failure to maintain daily clean water for seventy-eight turtles housed in a single unsanitary pool smelling of ammonia. And one more, for failure to meet minimum caging and water requirements for an African spurred tortoise. Wildlife veterinarians called in to assess the situation found ten birds with extensive untreated injuries. Eight of them had to be euthanized for necrotic flesh and exposed bones. The others were taken to outside veterinarians.

  Less than two months later, wildlife inspector Lar Gregory returned for a follow-up visit. Conditions had improved to a degree. He reported that Ralph was “no longer rehabbing birds at his home or the warehouse,”187 and that the warehouse had been outfitted with two ventilating fans for the turtle pools. The African spurred tortoise had immediately been removed. The pigeons in the warehouse were housed in a bigger room, away from the turtles, and appeared to be fine.

  I asked Gregory why Ralph’s rehabber’s license hadn’t been revoked the first time they inspected. “These people that do rehabs, other than donations, they don’t really get anything for it,” he told me. “A lot of these people have their heart in the right place and they want to help animals, and we like to see that. So, we really just want to see them in compliance. We’re not in the business of shutting people down.” Florida Fish and Wildlife doesn’t regulate pigeons, as they’re not considered wild—they’re considered domestic animals. There is no regulation on the number of pigeons a person can have.188

  I asked what would happen to the pigeons in Ralph’s house and the warehouse if Ralph had to be shut down.

  “You’d have to consider euthanasia,” Gregory said. “Because you can’t just release those out into the wild.”

  In January 2016, Jimbo told me, Andrew, Alex, and Peter planned to return to Florida to force Ralph out of his house and into the warehouse.189 In the Greek restaurant, I had asked Ralph why he’d want to live in the warehouse as opposed to moving into a new house. “Well, one thing that I’ve always worried about is hurricanes,”190 he said. “I’ve always been worried about hurricanes because, actually, the last big hurricane that hit here was 1848. So, we’re way overdue for a major hit.”

  Ralph had spent a good 50 percent of our second phone conversation talking about hurricanes. He has an encyclopedic memory for them, and a visceral fear not just for his own life, but also for the lives of his birds. He had outlined this horror for me: of a bird lying somewhere without his knowledge and him unable to help it. Recalling the rescue of an orphaned baby pigeon later in our conversation at the restaurant, he began to cry openly. I reached over to the nearest table to find him a napkin. A hurricane scenario is the worst he can imagine. We’d been discussing the stunning number of pigeon species—there are over nine hundred varieties—but we were off on a serious tangent now.

  Ralph repeats himself a lot while he’s talking, as if he’s lost track of the thread of his thought and has to start over to retrace it. Consequently, it takes him a long time to tell a single simple story, and he repeats the same stories over and over again, almost verbatim.

  “Everyone laughed at me about being afraid of hurricanes until Andrew hit Miami,” he said. “Then they weren’t laughing anymore, when the place looked like a nuclear bomb went off. That storm that hit Mexico, did you know it went from a Force One to a Force Five in twenty-four hours?”

  I said that I did.

  “That was unheard of. And also Andrew, the one that hit Miami, it increased unexpectedly right before it hit shore. And Charlie, that was coming up the west coast, that we thought was going to hit here, the abrupt right turn into Charlotte Harbor, it was increasing slowly, but they said if it hit—look up the history—Tampa Bay was bull’s-eye. I mean, they were expecting it to come right up the coast and then turn in, right into Tampa Bay. And every single—what’s the word I’m looking for?—seasoned weather person in this area had said, if it made it to Tampa Bay, it would have been a Force Five. The computer graphics, printouts, predictions, whatever you want to call it, if it had made it to Tampa Bay, it would have been a Force Five.”

  I searched for the proper way to respond. I questioned how helpful this talk about storms was. To me it seemed, all of it, very symbolic. Some storm or destructive force appeared to be churning just offshore of Ralph’s psyche, threatening to tear apart his fragile ecosystem.

  “I bet it feels nice to have the birds in the warehouse,” I said. “So, not just for your own protection, but for the birds’ protection as well.”

  “I couldn’t stand it if my birds weren’t okay,” he said. “That I couldn’t take, you know?”

  I said I believed him.

  “When you’ve raised a baby bird from—like Grungy, for instance—you live with them and stuff like that, you don’t want them to get killed. And people just flat don’t realize—people don’t understand how powerful you have to build a building to withstand hundred-fifty-mile-per-hour-or-more winds. It’s just absolutely crazy.

  “And actually, Chief Jim Billie, chief of the Seminoles, he told me stories, eons ago, before the weather station or people keeping the weather reports or records, of what they called the ‘bad winds.’”

  In the moment, this talk felt normal. We sat in that restaurant for three hours total, while Ralph did most of the talking. The waitress reminded us twice to pay at the front. Ralph asked for a to-go container to bring crumbs from my spinach pie and scraps from his salad back to his chickens. Ralph has fifty chickens in the warehouse. He feeds their eggs to his crows.

  Ralph is one of these people who doesn’t need much prompting in interviews. Our conversation wended its way from the evils of mass media, to hurricanes, to pigeons, to his contempt for the condos next door to the sanctuary, to the fate of the environment, to the fate of the human race—and finally to the night before, when he saved a starling stuck to a phone pole. A friend had called him on behalf of another friend. Ralph had wrested the bird free, and was keeping it in his house now, until it got its strength back.

  “The birds are lucky to have you,” I said.

  “Oh, I like my little creatures,” he said. “The most important thing is—and you’re welcome to put it down even though it forms more of a psychic story—is the number of herons, egrets, pelicans, even the lowly gray pigeons that will wait—usually you could almost set your clock, it’s usually between eleven and twelve o’clock at night, and it’s only when I’m alone, and they will either fly, walk, or crawl up to me, or even land on me in some cases, and not just here but in some places when I’m away from the sanctuary.”

  “Like they’re sending messages to each other in other places?”

  “No,” he said. “Actually, I asked Chief Jim. I always refer to him because he’s forgotten more about the wildlife and the environment, especially in the Everglades, than most anybody ever knows, and things that aren’t in any books.”

  Chief Jim Billie is the longest-serving chairman of the Seminole tribe of Florida.191 Jim’s name resurfaced repeatedly while we talked. Their meeting had become a pearl in Ralph’s mind, a grain of sand around which Ralph had deposited layers and layers of soft tissue that had hardened.

  “One time I said, ‘Chief Jim, why are these totally wild birds that I haven’t, so far as I know, had any contact with before walk—I’m talking about herons hobbling up to me with broken legs—walking up to me with broken wings, pigeons landing on me that are sick or injured?’ He says, ‘What you’re doing is putting out an aura like a radar.’ And he says, ‘The birds are picking up on it.’ All species, because I’ve had pelicans and egrets. I’ve had birds hobble out from under cars and everything, and come up to me, when they know I’m there at night. It’s usually between eleven and twelve o’clock a
t night. It’s not in the daytime, it’s usually at night. He says, ‘You’re putting up this aura, like a radar, that the birds are picking up on. They’re coming to you, to know that they can get help.’ And I’m talking about, you get a wild heron or egret just to walk up to you, stand there without moving, and let you pick it up, and operate on it without any anesthesia. I’m talking about setting wings, setting legs, sewing them up. Now, because it’s just me and it’s usually late at night, so nobody else is around. The bird will lie absolutely still, just like that dish there. And looking at me. These are totally awake, alert birds. You go pick up a blue heron and get him to lie on his side, not moving, with no anesthesia.”

  The story he’d been trying to arrive at finally came out: Late one night, between eleven and twelve o’clock, a blue heron approached Ralph at the sanctuary. He was alone. It walked directly up to him and stopped, like a lady wanting to dance. Instinctively, Ralph wrapped his arm around the bird, and four of his fingers slipped into a large wound, still very fresh. Removing his hand, he found it was covered with blood. He brought the bird to his house and laid it across his washer and dryer.

  “I mean, this bird’s not even moving,” he said. “He’s letting me do whatever I want to with him. I laid him down and turned him over. You gotta remember: this is a totally alert, alive, awake, nonanesthetized heron. He’s not sedated in any way. I laid him on his side, and he let me do whatever I want to with him. So, I turn him over. And he’s looking at me, you know? I saw the gash in his back and it was easy to see what it was, because it was a fishhook at the bottom of this gash. The hook wasn’t very big to make a gash this big and deep, and it was right along the edge of his backbone.”

  Ralph stitched the bird up, using skills his father taught him.