Knife in hand, a lifeless body and a lot of questions laid out before him, Florida's sea cow sleuth spends his days. It makes those rare occasions seeing a living manatee all the better.
By CRAIG PITTMAN
Published March 11, 2004
[Times photo: Ron Thompson]
Tom Pitchford pulls a dead female manatee from Citrus County’s Homosassa River in February. He and his staff handled 380 carcasses last year.
[Times photo: Willie J. Allen Jr.]
Once at the lab, Pitchford performs a necropsy to determine the cause of death. Nearly every dead manatee in the state ends up on his table.
ST. PETERSBURG - Tom Pitchford spends nearly all his waking hours thinking about manatees.
He has tried to swim like them. He has tracked down places where they hide. He has rescued scores of hurt ones. He has hauled in hundreds more that were dead.
He even met his wife, Meg, while rescuing a manatee. They both wound up covered with mud. Somehow, love bloomed. Now they have three kids.
Pitchford has an office the size of a closet in a one-story beige building on the back corner of the Eckerd College campus. The sign out front says, "Florida Marine Mammal Pathology Laboratory." Pitchford has been in charge of it since 1998.
Nearly every dead manatee in Florida is brought here so Pitchford and his colleagues can figure out what killed them. They're the C.S.I. of manatees.
Last year, they handled 380 carcasses that had been slammed, sliced, crushed, poisoned or killed some other way.
Through his office window, Pitchford can see some of the lush banana trees that grow around the lab. The trees grow so well because the laboratory staff fertilizes them with the lab's, um, leftovers.
The staff has dubbed the fruit "Manabananas."
"They're good!" Pitchford said with a laugh. Then, in a more serious tone, he added, "You try to make something positive out of the fact that we get so many dead manatees a year."
His job would be depressing, he says, except for the frequent calls to help save manatees that are sick or injured. When someone phones the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission's hotline to report a manatee in trouble, he and his staff scramble for their trucks, even on weekends and holidays.
Pitchford's job is like running a coroner's office and a paramedic unit at the same time.
"If you can participate in a rescue and keep even one manatee from being the next carcass on the table, it's worthwhile," he said.
Pitchford is 6-foot-1 and still as lean as he was in college when he worked as a lifeguard. He has blue eyes and long, slender fingers that look like they ought to play the piano, not poke around in dead animals. His tousled hair is starting to go gray. He rarely wears socks or raises his voice.
In his office, books and papers are stacked everywhere. Post-It notes climb the door like ivy. On the floor is a Tinker Toy set he borrowed from his kids to work out a forensic puzzle. Leaning against his desk is the bottom half of a boat motor.
Sometimes, when he's sitting there chatting, he can seem a bit distracted. But when he puts on his rubber boots and apron, grabs a skinning knife and straddles a fresh carcass on the lab's steel examining table, he's completely focused. Not even the buzzing of the bug zapper throws him off.
Dead manatees have been Pitchford's line of work for 11 years. You might think he would become jaded. But when he was getting a degree in horticulture at Virginia Tech, his nickname was Curious George. It still fits.
When he takes his kids for a walk on the beach, "he'll be just as excited about finding something on the beach as they are," Meg Pitchford says. "I call him my fourth kid. He's never going to grow up."
Tom Pitchford is 44. His wife is 28.
"If he was any younger," she says, "I don't think I could handle him."
A political animal
Pitchford has seen more dead manatees than anyone else in Florida. He has seen manatees that were poisoned by Red Tide, squished by canal locks, stunned by chilly water, tangled in fishing line.
On one unforgettable occasion, he saw a dead manatee's heart explode out of its chest and arc across the lab. A British television crew filmed the whole thing. The reporter had just described, in a proper strawberries-at-Wimbledon accent, how decomposed the carcass was. Then the lab staff made the first incision and the heart shot past her head.
"Whoa!" the reporter yelled, jumping sideways.
Pitchford has seen manatees with crushed skulls, broken ribs, mutilated hides, all caused by boats. Boats have been the leading cause of death for manatees during the past 30 years, accounting for about one-fourth of more than 4,000 carcasses.
The number of manatee deaths from all causes is increasing faster than the state's manatee population, now estimated to be about 3,000.
Based in part on the lab's findings, state and federal officials have restricted boating and blocked waterfront development. Some boaters and developers don't like the restrictions.
Critics have sharply questioned the science behind the regulations. Lawmakers have talked of taking the money from the sale of "Save the Manatee" license plates, which is supposed to go for research, and using it for other purposes or steering it to private labs in their own districts.
Boating advocate Ron Pritchard of Citizens for Florida's Waterways says Pitchford and his staff are biased against boaters and as a result don't bother to do a thorough investigation of manatee deaths.
"They're running a meat market," complained Pritchard, a Brevard County commissioner.
Not every boater blames the lab. Jim Kalvin of the boating rights group Standing Watch is a frequent critic of state and federal officials, but he says he has "complete confidence" in Pitchford and his staff.
Kalvin has toured the lab twice, once with Pitchford. The second time, just before Kalvin and his teenage son arrived, the staff had to scramble on a rescue. So Pitchford told the Kalvins where he hid the keys and how to disable the burglar alarm. That act of trust made a big impression.
Still, the high-decibel political and legal battles over manatee protection add to the strain of a job that is already physically, intellectually and emotionally demanding, says James "Buddy" Powell, who put Pitchford in charge of the lab five years ago.
"I'm amazed he's lasted as long as he has," said Powell, who quit to work for an environmental group.
Pitchford says he and the lab are nearing a crossroads. The number of dead manatees has grown about 7 percent a year while the budget for picking them up and dissecting them has stayed the same. Soon, he says, a decision must be made:
"Can we continue to collect every single manatee reported dead in Florida without going broke?"
A sketch of scars
Pitchford still remembers the first manatee he ever saw. It wasn't long ago.
He grew up the fifth of 10 children, seven of them boys. His dad was a decorated U.S. Marine Corps colonel. His mom somehow handled all 10 kids by herself while his dad was in Vietnam.
Pitchford spent his childhood on a series of coastal military bases: Jacksonville, Norfolk, Camp Lejeune. He caught turtles and crabs and learned to sail and surf. But he never saw a manatee in Jacksonville, or while visiting his grandparents in St. Petersburg.
After college he worked for a museum near Chesapeake Bay and volunteered with a group that rescued stranded bottlenose dolphins.
Then one day a manatee swam into his life.
Manatees rarely stray from Florida; they're too sensitive to cold. But in October 1992, a male manatee turned up in a canal lock near the Chesapeake.
Pitchford's dolphin rescue group went to check it out. They noticed that the manatee had some scars. Intrigued, Pitchford made some calls. He talked to a federal biologist named Cathy Beck in Gainesville. He made a careful sketch of the manatee's scars and faxed it to her.
Beck keeps a computer database of thousands of manatee pictures, each one identified by the scars on its thick gray hide. Most of the scars come from encounters with boats. Some manatees have dozens of scars from being hit.
Beck matched Pitchford's sketch to photos of a manatee first spotted in the Port Everglades area in 1987. Known as PE176, it had somehow managed to swim more than 700 miles north and find Pitchford.
No one has seen it since, dead or alive. Still, thanks to PE176, Curious George became very curious about manatees.
"It was interesting to me you could send off a sketch, just a sketch, that's all it was, and identify the animal," he said. "It made me think they were doing some exciting things down here."
Three months later, Pitchford was driving south, headed for the nastiest job in Florida.
Almost an obsession
Thirty years ago, when a dead manatee turned up by your dock, it just floated there, drawing flies. There was no hotline to call, no one to retrieve it.
But after Congress passed the Endangered Species Act, federal and state officials became interested in finding out why manatees died. In 1974, biologists began systematically dissecting carcasses.
In February 1993, the state hired Pitchford to pick up every bloated, rotting manatee carcass that turned up in Collier, Lee, Charlotte and Sarasota counties and haul them to the lab in St. Petersburg. Nearly half the manatee population lives in Southwest Florida, so Pitchford had his hands full.
Every day as he drove to work in Port Charlotte, he passed a sign for a resort called Warm Mineral Springs. The sign said the spring was 87 degrees year-round. He wondered if, in cold weather, manatees might like that.
Pitchford began hunting for them.
"It became almost an obsession to go there all the time," he said. "I'd go at the crack of dawn or late at night and stand in people's back yards."
One night at dusk, his search paid off: "To see the procession of manatees coming in head to tail like RVs, 20 of them, it was just awesome to see."
Pitchford's discovery is the only new warm-water manatee refuge found in the past two decades. The significance of his find has grown with the years. Last winter, biologists spotted more than 100 manatees at Warm Mineral Springs.
He still enjoys tracking down places manatees hole up. He and his staff recently found a soul food restaurant in Sulphur Springs called the Harbor Club. The restaurant overlooks a small boil bubbling up from under the Hillsborough River where manatees can bask in the warmth.
One afternoon in January, after polishing off a plate of pork chops, Pitchford snapped pictures of a pair of manatees that had settled into the boil.
Suddenly, the River Odyssey Eco-Tour boat sponsored by the Lowry Park Zoo rumbled up, scaring them off. Just as the manatees began easing back into the boil, the tour boat backed up until it was nearly on top of them. The manatees fled.
Normally as mild as milk, Pitchford sputtered with outrage on the ride back to St. Petersburg. He called zoo officials to complain about the boat.
As a result, zoo president Lex Salisbury fired off a letter to the tour boat operator, Sun Line Cruises, calling the captain's actions "unacceptable."
The cruise line promised that the boat's crew would be more careful: "They are aware that even the appearance of inappropriate behavior in the presence of manatees is unacceptable and will not be tolerated."
A phone and a knife
In 1995, Pitchford stumbled onto a mystery. He picked up some manatees that appeared to be completely healthy except for being dead.
His bosses at the St. Petersburg lab decided the cause was pneumonia. Pitchford thought it might be Red Tide. He talked to some experts and found some funding for tests. But his bosses said no thanks.
A year later, scores of dead manatees began turning up in Southwest Florida. Pitchford was pulling in so many carcasses that the lab couldn't handle them all. He helped set up an outdoor facility on Sanibel Island to deal with the deaths.
State officials declared themselves baffled. CNN and People ran alarming stories. Pitchford handled calls from reporters from around the world.
Ken Haddad, now the executive director of the state Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, went to Sanibel to see what was happening.
"There I saw Tom in a pair of shorts, white boots, white T-shirt, with a phone in one hand, a large knife in the other hand and this, uh, let's just say a sea of manatee carcasses that had been coming in so fast that they couldn't keep up with them," Haddad said.
Finally, after 149 manatees had died, the mystery was solved: Red Tide did it.
Later, a lab staffer looked back at the 1995 reports on the manatees Pitchford had found. They had the same symptoms.
Pick up sticks
While he worked in Port Charlotte, Pitchford bought a unifin, a type of swim fin that puts both of the swimmer's feet into a single, large paddle.
"It's so you can swim like a manatee," he explained. "If you're trying to swim with a manatee, you imitate a manatee."
In August 1997, he was called to rescue a badly injured manatee from a muddy creek bank in Sarasota. A crew drove down from St. Petersburg to help.
Everyone got thoroughly messy hauling out the prop-scarred manatee, which later died. Afterward, Pitchford and the others went to a friend's condo to clean up and swim in the pool.
Pitchford began chatting with a vivacious, blond-haired woman from the St. Petersburg crew, a recent Eckerd College graduate. Despite their age difference, he found a way to get her attention.
"Tom happened to have his unifin in his car," Meg Pitchford said. "I'd never seen one."
In 2000, they got married on the beach. He wore socks for once.
They never got around to a honeymoon. Their daughter, Shannon, was born later that year. Now 14-month-old twins, Jonathan and Owen, help liven up their Redington Shores bungalow.
Shannon is "a total daddy's girl," Meg Pitchford said. One of Shannon's favorite backyard games is to ride her Big Wheel around, picking up sticks.
She says the sticks are dead manatees.
"We have to bring them to the lab," Shannon said.
- Times researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.
