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Real Florida

A wild life

Bruce Rinker, the manager of Pinellas County's habitats, has his office at the Brooker Creek Preserve and his heart in the Amazon.

By JEFF KLINKENBERG
Published December 3, 2004

	[Times photo: Douglas Clifford]
	"Lots of my friends are bewildered that I'm working in Pinellas County," says Bruce Rinker, holding a stuffed flying fox bat from Indonesia. "They say, "You're an Amazon guy. How can you work in an urban county?' "

TARPON SPRINGS - Bruce Rinker is more of a saunterer than a hiker. Hikers usually have a destination in mind, but saunterers take their time. The trip - the saunter - is often more important than reaching the finish line.

Rinker, 49, is the new manager of Pinellas County's Environmental Lands Division. His office is at the Brooker Creek Preserve. Brooker Creek's 8,000 acres are a wonderful place to saunter, though if you want to hike instead, be Rinker's guest.

"Wild turkeys," he says. In the holiday spirit, a flock crosses the road in front of him. "If you slow down," Rinker says, "you tend to see more. If you plow ahead too fast, you scare the critters away."

Brooker Creek is as far north, and as far east, as one can go in the state's most urban county. It is also the last place in Pinellas where it is possible to encounter bobcats, wild turkeys and whitetail deer. If some wayward bear or Florida panther shows up in the distant future, Rinker won't be surprised. Brooker Creek offers genuine wilderness.

He will be surprised, however, to discover bird-eating tarantulas, vampire catfish and hungry bot flies.

Surprised, and maybe a tad disappointed.

A burly guy with a beard and an Indiana Jones twinkle in his dark eyes, Rinker looks like he might have recently parachuted into Pinellas from the Amazon. In fact, that's close to the truth.

He is probably the only person who drives to work with a nice set of piranha jaws next to his gear shift.

"We were swimming with a school of them in the Amazon," he explains. "A fisherman came up in a canoe and started catching them right next to we swimmers. I borrowed a pole and caught a big one on a piece of raw chicken. The fisherman cleaned and cooked it for me. Piranhas are a tasty fish. Nice, white meat."

Aren't piranhas known for sampling the tasty, tender flesh of American turistas?

"No, it's mostly a movie myth. There are all kinds of piranha, including some that eat only figs. I would stay out of the water during droughts, though. Then there are some piranha that are concentrated in these little ponds. They tend to be very hungry and aggressive. You wouldn't want to go for a swim if you were bleeding or menstruating."

He stops in his tracks.

"Listen to that!"

Sadly, it's not the horrified shriek of a swimmer, but something just as cool. A red-shouldered hawk is crying above the cypress forest of Brooker Creek.

"Lots of my friends are bewildered that I'm working in Pinellas County," says Rinker, who began his job in August. "They say, "You're an Amazon guy. How can you work in an urban county?' I'd love to have my friends trail me for a while and see everything that I see."

Rinker suffers from acrophobia. Being afraid of heights, however, did not scare him away from studying life in the Amazon treetops. He earned his doctorate from Antioch New England Graduate School by studying the effects of canopy herbivory on soil microarthropods in a tropical rain forest. In lay terms, he studied leaf-eating bugs, 16,472 of them, according to his dissertation.

Industrious insects treat treetops like a Brooklyn deli. They eat lots of leaves, but like a baby in a high chair, they don't retain every bite. Leaf chunks, and later insect excretions, fall to the forest floor. This "manna from the treetops," as Rinker calls it, becomes chow to countless other insects that live on the ground floor. Without the vittles, they'd go hungry. They'd be unable to perform their jobs, maintaining the health of the soil. Without insects, a tree-canopy guy will argue, there would be no Amazon forest.

Studying leaf-eating bugs involves climbing trees. Trees in the Amazon are amazonian. Climbing one requires steady nerves, ropes and sometimes even a hot-air balloon. Rinker learned to climb slowly and not think too much.

Of course, sometimes even an acrophobe gets lucky, like during the rainy season, when the forest floods. Then it is possible to paddle a canoe through the treetops.

What is good for an acrophobe, however, can be bad fortune for the explorer who suffers from arachnophobia. The largest spider in the world, found in the Amazon, is the Goliath bird-eating tarantula. A baby Goliath is about 8 inches across. In his office, Rinker has such a baby, deceased and displayed in a paperweight. A grownup, by the way, can measure 11 inches across, has 1-inch fangs and hisses.

Now, it doesn't hiss when climbing a tree and sneaking up on a nest of birds. It prefers stealth. Pouncing, it catches a young bird and injects digestive juices. The juices melt the insides of the bird, and the tarantula slurps the avian milkshake.

Rinker, it turns out, is more afraid of heights than bird-eating tarantulas. But that was untrue of the graduate student who sat in the bow of Rinker's canoe during an Amazon expedition. There they were, paddling through the treetops, knocking branches aside as they traveled along, when Rinker stopped paddling.

"Josh," he told his spider-fearing friend. "I hate to tell you this, but you have a bird-eating tarantula on your back."

Josh remained still long enough for Rinker to brush it off. Only then could Josh do what he longed to do: scream hysterically.

Bruce Rinker misses the Amazon.

He also misses Virginia, his birthplace, where he once snacked on robust apples. But he likes oranges, too, and other Florida flora and fauna. "Look at this duckweed," he says, hunkering next to a pond. "You know what Emerson said about weeds, don't you? He said, "There are plants whose virtues are yet to be discovered.' "

Duckweed is the smallest flowering weed in Florida. Feeding in a pond, ducks get duckweed stuck to their legs. At the next pond, the weeds drop off. Ducks spread duckweed.

There are miles of trail at Brooker Creek, so many miles, so many pines, so many cypress, so many ponds and creeks, that it might be the only place in the Tampa Bay area where a saunterer can truly become lost. For Rinker, the idea of getting lost in the most urban county is actually pleasant. Then again, he also loves rattlesnakes, moccasins and alligators. In his opinion, predators are what put the "wild" in wilderness.

"This is perfect shrike territory," he says, sauntering among the pines. "Loggerhead shrikes are a predatory songbird, for heaven's sake. A friend of mine saw one grab a titmouse, puncture its skull and fly off with it! Isn't that something? Isn't that amazing? People tell me we don't have dinosaurs anymore, but we do. They just got smaller and evolved feathers."

He is fond of winged creatures, even biting ones. In the summer, Brooker Creek is a fine place to cultivate mosquito bites.

Worse things in life than a little old mosquito bite.

"In the cloud forests of Ecuador, there is something called the bot fly. The bot fly is a very big fly with hairy legs. They catch female mosquitoes with those hairy legs and glue their eggs to the mosquito. When the mosquito bites, the eggs of the bot fly are deposited on the victim."

When Rinker returned to the United States from such a cloud-forest expedition in 1988, he noticed a nasty lesion on his wrist. One night he felt something alive - something alive under the bandage, inside of him.

"I took off the bandage and saw what looked like a tiny snorkel coming out of the wound."

A tiny snorkel emerging from a wound would alarm most of us. But Rinker knew something about bot flies. For example, he knew he shouldn't yank it out. The only thing worse than having a bot fly inside of you is having half a bot fly. A broken bot fly, oozing body fluids, can cause serious infection.

"Luckily, I'd just come back from the butcher with a nice piece of sirloin for dinner. I cut off a little piece of the steak and strapped it to my wrist with gauze. A few hours later - actually, about 12 hours later - I felt some movement. The bot fly larvae had traveled from my wrist into the steak.

"Great for dinner conversation!"

Rinker keeps a picnic basket in the corner of his Brooker Creek office. For heaven's sake, don't ask him for a peek, because there are no bottles of wine or hunks of cheese in it.

Okay. Ask for a peek if you dare.

In the basket are souvenirs from the Amazon, including the little bottle containing his pickled bot fly.

And that other bottle? What's that floating inside?

"Oh, that's a candiru."

Anacondas and deadly fer-de-lance snakes and piranhas and bird-eating tarantulas get all the glory, but the candiru, or vampire catfish, is probably the most feared creature in the Amazon.

"I caught this beastie in a dip net," he says. "It had been one of my life goals to have one."

The candiru in his basket looks like nothing out of a horror movie. It is about an inch long and hardly thicker than a strand of spaghetti.

"Candirus feed for the most part on the blood of fish. They'll swim into the gills, throw out their spines to get secure and start feeding."

A candiru's philosophy might be described as "any port in a storm."

"They feed on more than fish. For example, you don't want to go skinny dipping in candiru habitat. If you are skinny-dipping, you definitely don't want to urinate in the water."

A nearby candiru, feeling the warmth and the flow of the urine, might come investigating. They aren't the smartest fish in the jungle and make mistakes. Looking for a fish's delicious gills, they sometimes end up swimming up the urinary tracts of human skinny dippers. Once a candiru is in place, spines erected, it can't back out.

"It's supposed to be excruciatingly painful beyond belief," says Rinker, standing outside his office at Brooker Creek. "In fact, there are actually a few documented cases of men taking the most extreme measures to end their misery. They use machetes."

In the fading light, on the other side of the parking lot, something moves through the gloom of Brooker Creek.

"Cool!" says Bruce Rinker. "It's a deer."

-- Jeff Klinkenberg can be reached at 727 893-8727 or klink@sptimes.com

-- Brooker Creek Preserve is open for hiking dawn to dusk daily at the Lora Lane entrance off Keystone Road. The preserve's environmental education center and gift shop, at 3940 Keystone Road, are open from 9 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. Wednesday and 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Thursday through Sunday. 727 453-6800; www.pinellascounty.org/environment

[Last modified December 2, 2004, 10:00:11]