UMass Magazine Online

Fall 2003

Departments

Features

Experiencing Jeff Corwin

Drawing on the past

Clean-up at the old Davis Mine

Feature

Experiencing Jeff Corwin
“I can’t think of a creature that doesn’t fascinate me.”

Christopher O'Carroll




	Hands-on, face to face, respectful: Jeff Corwin’s winning way with wild creatures. (photo by Peter Schwepker, Popular Arts Entertainment)

YOU'VE SEEN HIM ON YOUR television screen gripping poisonous snakes in his bare hands, his fingers just inches from their fangs. You’ve seen him hoisting big, gargoyle-faced lizards up to the camera. You’ve held your breath as he’s crept up on lions, rhinos and other fearsome wild creatures in their native habitats. You’ve even seen him playing himself on the crime drama “CSI Miami,” helping the detectives retrieve a human foot from inside a live crocodile. If you’re a fan of Animal Planet’s popular show, “The Jeff Corwin Experience,” then you know that star Jeff Corwin ’02G is not shy about close encounters with some pretty scary critters.

Now picture the intrepid naturalist in a tamer setting, with animals that melt the heart instead of causing it to skip a beat. Two newly adopted pound puppies gambol around his ankles. With one hand he holds a cell phone to his ear, taking care of some out-of-state business involving his show. With the other hand he reaches down to collect a piece of freshly deposited evidence that these frisky little fellas are not yet housebroken.

“My life is so glamorous,” the international TV star deadpans. “I’m picking up dog feces.”

There’s no camera rolling, so this scene won’t make it onto the air, but in a way it’s a classic “Jeff Corwin Experience” moment, nitty-gritty animal lore combined with gently self-mocking humor. It’s also a revealing glimpse of the personality behind Corwin’s media celebrity. This is a guy for whom love of animals is a lot more than just a professional credential or an aspect of his on-screen persona.

He rescued the pair of puppies from a New York City shelter last June, at the end of a typically hectic stint on the road with his film crew. He had started the month in Venezuela, shooting footage of anacondas, which aren’t the longest snakes on earth, but are the largest by weight. “One of them was 250 pounds, a 15-footer,” Corwin says. “So we’re talking colossal beasts.” Then it was on to Brazil to film some rare marmosets, a family of monkeys that are often smaller than squirrels. From there, the crew of “The Jeff Corwin Experience” moved to Texas to spend some time with rattlesnakes. Finally, they wrapped up their month-long odyssey with a trip to New York, working on what Corwin describes as “a shoot on urban wildlife – falcons and eagles and animals that have adapted to the urban jungle.”

For one segment of that urban wildlife show, Corwin wanted to get some film of shelter animals, many of whom are just days away from death, since only a tiny fraction of them manage to find homes. “We euthanize about 40 million dogs and cats a year in this country,” he says mournfully. One perceptive woman on the shelter staff, picking up on the famous visitor’s sentiments, went to work persuading him to take a puppy home with him. He agreed to adopt one, and somehow found himself walking out the door with two. He’s still not exactly sure how that happened, he says. Maybe that shelter employee was really good at her job. Or maybe she was dealing with somebody who didn’t need a lot of convincing to welcome a couple more animals into his life.

Ever since he was a young boy growing up in Norwell, Corwin has felt a special affinity for animals, especially for reptiles and amphibians. When TV Guide profiled him last March, he told the reporter a story about how a garter snake bit him when he was six years old, and how he freaked his grandmother out by being thrilled instead of horrified at the sight of the scaly, sinuous body swinging from his arm. “I always loved creepy crawly things like spiders and snakes and I could never understand why people didn’t like them,” he has written. “My bedroom was filled with aquariums containing many different creatures. I loved learning about them and teaching people about their importance.”

He majored in biology and anthropology at Bridgewater State College, and got a job after graduation with the Jason Project, a nature education effort spearheaded by Robert Ballard, the scientist best known for his work with the sunken Titanic. In 1994, the Jason Project sent Corwin to the Central American nation of Belize, where he appeared live on camera, transmitting his rain forest wildlife encounters to students back in the United States.

Everything about that first experience as a media naturalist felt right to him. He was doing hands-on fieldwork, expanding his knowledge of the wild animals he loved, and he was reaching out via the medium of television to share his passion with others. He began to imagine a career that would give him an opportunity to do more of the same, that would let him turn his wilderness adventures into regular installments of education and entertainment for a television audience.

“I came up with the idea for a TV series,” he recalls, “and spent a number of years trying to get it going, and worked my tail off. It was a very slow uphill battle. It’s very hard to become a person who has a job in television. The people who make it are either very lucky or don’t give up. It takes a lot of perseverance. Nobody ever saw me in a soda shop and said, ‘You should have a TV show!’”

After trying without success to interest producers in his nature show, he decided that he might have to retool his ambitions and think about a more traditional job in science education. He turned to the UMass fisheries and wildlife conservation program as an ideal place to continue his fieldwork with creatures in the wild while pursuing the advanced degree he would need for an academic career.

For his first year of course work as a graduate student, he relocated from eastern Massachusetts to temporary digs in South Deerfield. “I lived in between the Yankee Candle factory and the pickle factory,” he remembers. “So for a few days it smelled like vinegar and the other days it smelled like potpourri. Pretty intense odors.”

With that first fragrant year of graduate study under his belt, he moved back home to Cambridge, where he and his wife were living at the time, and commuted to Amherst a few times a week. “Quite a hike,” he says. But a mere hop, skip and jump compared to the globetrotting excursions that would soon come to define his professional life.

Perhaps he would have finished his master’s degree in another year or so of jaunting back and forth across Massachusetts. But fortune intervened in the shape of a phone call that he had feared might never come. Finally, after all his frustrating years of knocking to no avail at the door of the TV industry, somebody wanted to put him on the air. He took a few years off from graduate school to get his new career up and running, so by the time he returned to complete his degree, he was already well advanced along the road to Animal Planet stardom.

Curtice Griffin, a professor in the department of natural resources conservation, was one of Corwin’s graduate school advisors. Griffin remembers how surprised he and his colleagues were when the promising young master’s degree candidate announced one day that he wanted to take some time off from his studies because he had received an offer to do a TV show. “We were all shocked. We had no idea that those were his ambitions. We knew Jeff was a very energetic guy, always very creative, always making things happen. When he told us this was his dream and he had been offered the chance to do it, we told him, ‘You’d be crazy not to.’”

Today, “The Jeff Corwin Experience” is a broadcast phenomenon with a 20-person staff, counting the crew of six that accompanies the star into the field. The show airs, Corwin estimates, in 80 to 90 countries around the world. “It’s phenomenal the reach he has in educating people about wildlife and conservation issues,” Griffin says proudly of his former student’s accomplishments. “The impact he has had is just extraordinary.”

Corwin is still new enough to his own celebrity that he finds it exciting when he’s riding a train in India, for example, and a local fan approaches him for an autograph. “It always gets me,” he says. “It’s pretty cool when you’re in a far-off land and someone knows you.”

He’s also been tickled to discover that he has a following among the prominent and powerful. “I was at the White House as a guest of the chief of staff, Andrew Card. They invited me for Easter. Those things are always cool, when that happens. There are people that watch the show that you’d never think. It’s very popular in South America. Last year I got an invitation from the president of Colombia to come down and spend time with his family because his family watches the show. I ended up traveling on a private jet and going to a dinner with former President Bill Clinton.”

Hobnobbing with world leaders is just one of the perks Corwin has enjoyed since his emergence as an Animal Planet star. He’s also been invited for guest appearances on such popular programs as “Today,” “Good Morning America,” “The Tonight Show” and “Oprah Winfrey.” And, of course, there’s all that travel to faraway locations where the wild things are. “I’ve been around the world probably five or six times,” he says contentedly. “There are countries that few people go to that I’ve been to many times, like Borneo. I go to Africa probably three or four times a year. There are only a few places out there that I’m longing to go to that unfortunately it’s not safe to go to right now, like the Congo. China’s probably safe, but there are things I’d like to film in China that it’s kind of difficult to get access to, like the giant Chinese salamanders. But I’ve been to most of the places I want to go.”

Best of all, he’s been able to come home safe and healthy from all those distant places, from all his intimate interactions with untamed nature. “I very rarely worry about being in the field with wildlife,” he says. “I have been face-to-face with bears and lions and tigers. Everything that Dorothy Gale was afraid of I deal with on a regular basis. I thank God that I’ve never sustained a major injury, and I would like to think that comes from a respectful approach and a bit of common sense.”

Only once in his career has he suffered a severe collision with mortal danger. “I was bitten by a coral snake in Central America,” he recalls, “and I came very close to expiring. But I survived. I’m very careful when I handle venomous snakes. On my show and in life I try to work with them hands-on only when it’s necessary. I don’t want to give people the impression that it’s OK to just go up and handle animals.” (By the way, they used a rubber crocodile for that scene in “CSI Miami.” They probably didn’t use a real severed human foot either.)

Corwin names David Attenborough, the great BBC natural-ist responsible for “Life on Earth” and many other documentaries, as a major influence, and also George Page, creator of the PBS series, “Nature.” Other personal heroes who have shaped his thinking about the natural world include evolutionary theorist Charles Darwin (“Reading The Voyage of the Beagle, I was totally fascinated.”) and Transcendentalist author Henry David Thoreau, who wrote about nature with a blend of dirty-hands earthiness and soaring mysticism.

The influence of those thinkers is evident in Corwin’s ability to see beauty in nature where others might be inclined to see only red-in-tooth-and-claw frightfulness. “I’m intrigued by the evolutionary process,” he explains. “You see physical and behavioral adaptations and characteristics that allow a species to survive and thrive. Venom in its literary sense is a morose thing that hurts and injures. But in the world of evolution it’s a marvelous tool to kill the prey that you hunt or to defend yourself from predators. And I don’t look at animals as one being nice and one being bad – the pretty feathers of a bird as opposed to the fangs of a rattlesnake. Those adaptations are the hallmarks of that creature’s survival. Basically I’m just fascinated by the formulas of life, the equations that allow creatures to be. And as they carve out a niche for survival, inevitably they end up serving as a steppingstone for another creature’s survival, until everything is knotted together to make this one great living fabric.”

Hearing him talk in such philosophical terms about the meaning of life in the natural world, one might conclude that Corwin is a strictly serious scientist who approaches his TV show with an earnest sense of educational mission. And he is plenty serious about his work, to be sure. He wants “The Jeff Corwin Experience” to be as enlightening as Darwin’s Origin of Species and as inspirational as Thoreau’s Walden. But he’s also determined to make the show a whole lotta entertaining. In every episode, there’s a tremendous sense of fun on display. The host will talk to his animal guest stars in funny voices. (That TV Guide profile singled out his Marlon Brando impression for special mention.) He’ll interject weirdly prankish fantasy segments, like the memorable one in which he imagines crashing his plane in the desert and waking up to find nothing but bones where his leg used to be.

It’s all about showing his nature-loving viewers a good time. “My belief is that humor allows people to put down their guard and enjoy the learning process,” he says. “If people are having fun and enjoying themselves, they tend to learn more, to get more out of the experience. I mean, television ultimately is about entertainment. People watch television to enjoy themselves. People watch the show to see the animals that I’m seeing, to have a good time, and to go to exotic places and have an adventure. Now, if in the process they learn something, then that’s great. The idea is to make something that tastes good and is good for you.”

To create one 48-minute episode of tasty, nutritious TV (“The Jeff Corwin Experience” is an hour-long show, but they have to leave time for commercials) requires about two weeks of traveling and shooting. And while Corwin is an enthusiastic world traveler, he has also learned to treasure his time off the road. “If I were to retire now,” he says, “the last thing I’d want to do is get on a plane and go somewhere. To me, my greatest pleasure is staying at home with my friends and family. When you travel 10 months out of the year, you really cherish the times that you’re home.”

Corwin’s fans probably don’t need to worry that his “If I were to retire. …” might translate into his disappearance from the screen anytime soon. Still, he is excited these days about a new project that expands his activities beyond broadcasting into the realm of publishing. This November saw the publication of his book Living on the Edge: Amazing Relationships in the Natural World. The title, he says, refers to “how wildlife lives on the edge, but it’s a little bit of how I live on the edge doing what I do.”

The book will offer portraits in words and pictures of, as Corwin puts it, “four ecosystems that are very special to me.” Ranging across extremes from desert to rain forest, Living on the Edge will escort readers on a detailed tour of natural environments in Africa, South America, Central America and the southwestern United States. “I basically talk about how an ecosystem is more than just a place, it’s a community,” Corwin says. “And the organisms come together through predation and symbiosis and seed dispersal and pollination and all these things to invigorate this place. It’s peppered with personal adventures and experiences and all my own photography.”

It is probably a safe bet that snakes and other reptiles will feature as prominently in the book as they do on the author’s TV show, but that other animals will come in for their fair share of coverage as well. “Clearly snakes are my favorite things,” Corwin acknowledges, “and I’m very eager to teach people about snakes, dispel some of the fallacies and enlighten people on the importance of reptiles. I just enjoy them. I enjoy seeing snakes and studying them. But there are lots of other cool animals that I love working with.” He pauses to think of some examples. “Anteaters and sloths and armadillos fascinate me.” Another pause as he conducts a further search of the menagerie in his mind. Finally he gives up the attempt to single out any specific beast.

“I can’t think of a creature that doesn’t fascinate me.”

[top of page]

Experiencing Jeff Corwin

Experiencing: More images