Excerpt from Sunshine State by Sarah Gerard, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"That's the founder of the sanctuary, Ralph Heath," she said. "He's a very strange man."

"So, he's here a lot?" I asked.

"More than we want him to be."

I watched Ralph shuffle toward the office on his phone. His hair was thin and uncombed, and patches of scabs and scars dotted his bare skin. He paused in front of the vacant visitor information counter to look at a night heron perched on the roof like a gargoyle. The bird stared back down at him.

"What does he do?" I asked.

"Nothing. He drinks a lot, if I had to guess. So, if you see Ralph Heath, founder of the sanctuary, in the newspaper," she concluded, "you'll know to stay away."


The cover of the August 1974 issue of Smithsonian shows a blue heron standing on a grassy bank in front of a calm lake. A hunter's arrow dangles from its throat. Below it, the caption directs readers to an article on page thirty, titled "Volunteers Rescue Injured Wildfowl." The article is richly photographed. In one picture, Linda Heath's delicate hands slip a pill inside a baitfish to serve to a sick cormorant. In another, a hawk with a bandaged wing perches atop its cage, as if in thought. The article says Ralph and Linda "have become experts in the ways, deliberate or inadvertent, that birds come to grief at the hands of man." Linda cares for the baby birds in the hospital while Ralph fashions prosthetic limbs for birds whose legs must be amputated. "Heath is at his best saving birds which his fellow citizens have damaged," the writer asserts.

That year, the Suncoast Seabird Sanctuary became the first facility in history to mate the brown pelican in captivity. After years of exposure to pesticides and pollutants, the bird was endangered and on the verge of extinction. By the following year, the sanctuary had hatched the first brown pelican egg and Dewar's Scotch had featured Ralph in their Dewar's Profile ad campaign. According to the ad, which ran nationwide in publications like Esquire and Playboy, Ralph's hobbies included restoring antique cars and filmmaking. His favorite book: Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. In the ad's photo, he lifts a healthy pelican onto his forearm, its wings raised in preparation for flight before a virgin shoreline. Ralph is young and muscular, his dark hair full and perfectly mussed, '70s moustache responsibly trimmed yet wild. His gaze meets the camera as if he's about to speak; his hand ever so gently touches the pelican's soft breast. The two make a perfect couple, an iconic union: man and bird.

20/20 did a special on Ralph and the sanctuary, then the Today show and the New York Times. Editorials showed up in the local papers every few days with headlines like "Birds: Our Responsibility" and quotes from Ralph about the value of animal life and the public duty of seabird ministration. Disney came to the sanctuary seeking animal stars for its Discovery Island theme park. Soon, Ralph was sending rehabilitated birds to zoos all over the world, in Greece and Singapore, Spain and Barbados. On a trip to deliver pelicans to Texas, Navy Commander and president of the local Audubon Society Bruce McCandless, the first man to float free from the Challenger shuttle—" all atilt, with no tether," as Ralph later put it—took him bird-watching in his amphibian aircraft. Ralph's reputation as a wildlife documentarian grew as he shot films from the sanctuary yacht, the Whisker, and fully inhabited his role as an advocate for the plight of birds everywhere.


Ralph and Linda divorced three years after the sanctuary opened, and in 1982 he married Beatrice Busch, millionaire Anheuser-Busch heiress, wildlife photojournalist, and world traveler.

Excerpted from Sunshine State by Sarah Gerard. Copyright © 2017 by Sarah Gerard. Excerpted by permission of Harper Perennial. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.