Lifestyles

The Jeff Corwin Experience

Joe Raedle

When Jeff Corwin headed to a remote corner of Cambodia with CNN’s Anderson Cooper to call attention to the plight of the country’s wild elephant population, he didn’t think he’d go from reporting the news to making it. But at a wildlife rehabilitation center where Corwin was helping workers handle three of the giant pachyderms, that’s exactly what happened.

“The elephants are taken every day, twice a day, to a lagoon to be washed and exercised. We were talking, and one of the elephants was over my shoulder. My understanding of what happened,” Corwin recalls, his voice falling low and grim, “is that he reached out and grabbed me so tightly in his mouth that he instantly crushed many of the ligaments in my arm. It wasn’t so severe that it cracked the bones, but it was so invasive in that it did what would happen if you took a leg of lamb and squeezed it in a vice. He thrashed me back and forth. Had the handlers not intervened, I wouldn’t be here now. The pain was so overwhelming I nearly blacked out.”

It’s obvious Corwin, a man used to being in front of the lens, has a difficult time reliving the March 2007 encounter, which was caught on camera and has since been rebroadcast to death across the Internet.

“To this day my arm doesn’t work right. We tend to look at elephants as these very kind, very gentle giants, like Dumbo and Jumbo from the cartoons. But the truth is, elephants are complex mammals with a huge array of emotions, from happiness to anger to jealousy, and when I turned away, this was his way of telling me he didn’t want to be ignored. The trunk of an elephant can lift a 700-pound tree limb. You do not want to be that close to one when he’s having a bad moment.”

But Corwin doesn’t bear any grudges when it comes to his on-screen co-stars. After all, rubbing elbows with the rarest, most magnificent and, admittedly, dangerous animals on the planet is his specialty. Immediately after the incident, in spite of the agony of a crushed arm, Corwin jumped back into his journalistic role and finished reporting the story.

“I was there to investigate the conflict between elephants and humans. You don’t get a better example of the story than what had just happened to me.”

Animal Planet/Martin Klimek/Getty

As any of the millions of loyal viewers who’ve followed his TV adventures can attest, Jeff Corwin loves wildlife. And usually the wilder it is, the better. The man who helped turn Animal Planet from a flyover cable network into appointment television, thanks to its “Wild Wednesday” lineup, is a lifelong fan of all creatures great and small—particularly of those that creep, crawl and slither.

“I love snakes. Snakes have been a passion of mine since childhood. I’m into conservation and animals because of snakes,” says the forty-year-old Massachusetts native. “When I was six, while exploring my grandparent’s backyard in Middleboro, Massachusetts, I turned over a log and had an encounter that forever changed my life. I saw this garter snake, and was immediately transfixed by it. I remember catching it and bringing it into the house with me and seeing the terror it unleashed in people, but not understanding why they were so afraid of it. As I’ve often said, if I’d rolled back that log and found a golf club, I would have been Tiger Woods.

Animal Planet/Ed Carreon

“I tracked that snake for two years and would visit it every time I went to my grandparents. One day, the neighbor next door snuck up behind me and cut off its head with a spade, thinking it was attacking me. I was so shocked by that behavior, by that expression of ignorance, it focused me on what I was going to do with my life. The day I found that snake was the day I became a naturalist. The day I saw it get killed out of a misunderstanding was the day I became a conservationist.”

Corwin’s first big break into television came about thanks to famed oceanographer Bob Ballard, the man who discovered the wreck of the Titanic, in the 1994 documentary Ballard produced for National Geographic called The Jason Project. Then, after several lean years, Corwin migrated over to the Disney Channel with Going Wild with Jeff Corwin. Eventually, he caught the eye of producers at Animal Planet, and since 2000 he’s gone on to explore six of the seven continents—all except Antarctica, so far—taking the audience along for the experience, which can often make even the most-stoic of channel surfer’s cringe.

Animal Planet/Martin Klimek/Getty

“Now, I’m not a spider person. I get that clenching sensation in my guts when I’m around them,” Corwin admits. “I’m not afraid of them, but I’m not looking to cuddle up with them, either. I always tell people who are nervous about spiders that we’re never more than ten feet away from one, no matter where we are in the world. Over the course of a lifetime, a person probably eats over a hundred spiders—in our food, and at night as we sleep with our mouths open. They’re hunting for prey and you accidentally suck them in.

“I did a special on what it would be like if humans and dinosaurs lived together today. To illustrate it, I went in search of the modern relatives of our prehistoric giants. We tend to think of spiders as small creatures. But there once used to be a tarantula that had a three- to four-foot leg span. It was a voracious predator. The biggest surviving relative of that creature today is the giant bird-eating spider from Brazil. Those spiders are still incredibly gigantic, especially if you have a fear of spiders. They easily have twelve-inch leg spans, abdomens the size of a ripe plum, and they weigh in at a quarter of a pound. For our episode, we had a huge female that was pregnant. The big spiders are largely harmless and rarely bite. When they do, it’s for defense or offense. The most dangerous spiders in the world are the tiniest ones, like the funnel spider from Australia and the brown recluse and black widow. But for a tarantula, the thing is, it’ll whip the hairs off its back legs and defend itself with them. They’re like fiberglass. I let that spider crawl up my arm. It felt weird, prickly, like pins and needles. What was startling was the weight. You could feel a heaviness that you don’t usually equate with invertebrate species.”

Corwin’s Quest

First came The Jeff Corwin Experience on Animal Planet, then Corwin’s Quest and Jeff Corwin Unleashed, the show that won him an Emmy. Most recently, he’s been exploring the majestic wilds of our forty-ninth state in The Travel Channel’s exciting Into Alaska with Jeff Corwin. So what’s next on the charts?

“Viewers loved what we did with the Alaska series, so we followed it up with Into the American West. I traveled from the Canadian Rockies down to Mexico, from the Dakotas to Montana, and did everything from working on a cattle ranch delivering calves and driving cattle to radio collaring Gila Monsters in the desert to following the trails of Lewis and Clark,” says Corwin. “You go to Cambodia and, yeah, you see elephants, but here, in my own backyard, I have a marsh that goes out across the ocean for as far as the eye can see. I can go and wander for days through the Sonoran Desert, the Cascades, the grass prairie and American savannah of Montana and Big Sky Country. I can get on a horse with a pack and go through the Grand Canyon—and if I’m not careful, never be seen again. People forget that in our country we still have an incredible frontier. My goal was to highlight this diverse habitat and culture we have in the American West that people largely take for granted. I’ve spent a lot of time traveling to far-off places to see exotic creatures, but what most people don’t realize is their own backyard—this terra firma we call home—is even more profound and incredible than all the other places on the planet. I want to get people excited about the rich diversity of America. And hopefully, when this one’s done, we’ll be able to do Into the East.”

In addition to his Animal Planet résumé, Corwin had a cameo on an episode of the hit crime show, CSI: Miami, and has been a guest judge on Iron Chef America, the frenetically paced cooking show that often relies upon ingredients as goosebump-worthy as creatures Corwin has encountered in past adventures. This past year he made the leap from Animal Planet to a place farther up the dial, to sister network The Travel Channel, with a whole new format—the adventure series Into Alaska with Jeff Corwin. Once again, Corwin struck ratings gold. In Alaska, he explores the nation’s largest state, from all points on the compass: climbing Mount McKinley, mushing a team of sled dogs across the treacherous Goddard Glacier, working on a commercial crab boat, and kayaking through icy waters with humpback whales.

Animal Planet/Ed Carreon

“I have a pioneer spirit,” Corwin says. “But being in Alaska took that spirit to the next level.”

During rare downtimes when he’s not hopping from one continent to another—on a typical, recent weekend Corwin flew down from Alaska to Massachusetts to steal a power-nap in his own bed before catching a plane to Africa one day later—he can be found at “Time and Tide,” the hundred-year-old farmhouse set on a twenty-two acre island a mile off the coast of Boston’s South Shore that the Corwin family calls home. The house is only accessible by water or on foot after the tide has gone out.

“When I come home I love to fly fish for striped bass, dig clams, have my buddies over, crack open a bottle, get a fire going on the beach and just hang out. To me, the ideal day off is going to the local lobsterman and getting a bunch of lobsters and doing a clam bake on the beach.”

Corwin’s schedule isn’t expected to slow down for at least the next two years. That’s the amount of time he’s already committed to travel and exploration projects for the Discovery Channel, parent to Animal Planet and The Travel Channel. Wherever the adventure leads Jeff Corwin after that is anybody’s guess, but one thing’s for certain: it’s sure to be a wild time!

New England-based writer Gregory L. Norris is our go-to guy for celebrity interviews. Keep an eye out for more big name profiles in upcoming issues of Heartland USA.