Leaders, conservationists mourn loss of ‘wildlife icon’
CAIRNS, Australia – He stalked lions. He faced off with poisonous snakes. He wrestled with crocodiles.
When the end came for television’s beloved “Crocodile Hunter,” it was in an encounter with a stingray and its venomous tail barb.
Perhaps it wasn’t surprising that Steve Irwin died doing what he loved most – getting too close to one of the dangerous animals he dedicated his life to protecting with an irrepressible, effervescent personality that propelled him to global fame.
The 44-year-old Irwin’s heart was pierced by the serrated, poisonous spine of a stingray as he swam with the creature Monday while shooting a TV show on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, his manager and producer, John Stainton, said.
Marine experts called the death a freak accident. They said stingrays reflexively deploy a sharp spine in their tails when frightened, but the venom coating the barb usually just causes a very painful sting for humans.
“It was extraordinarily bad luck,” said Shaun Collin, a University of Queensland marine neuro-scientist. “It’s not easy to get spined by a stingray, and to be killed by one is very rare.”
News of Irwin’s death reverberated around the world, where he had won popularity with millions as the man who regularly leaped on the backs of crocodiles and grabbed deadly snakes by the tail.
“I am shocked and distressed at Steve Irwin’s sudden, untimely and freakish death,” Australian Prime Minister John Howard said. “It’s a huge loss to Australia.”
Conservationists said all the world would feel the loss of Irwin, who turned a childhood love of snakes and lizards and knowledge learned at his parents’ side into a message of wildlife preservation that reached a television audience reportedly exceeding 200 million.
“He was probably one of the most knowledgeable reptile people in the entire world,” Jack Hanna, director emeritus of the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium in Ohio, told ABC’s “Good Morning America.”
Irwin was in the water at Batt Reef, off the Australian resort town of Port Douglas about 60 miles north of Cairns, shooting a series called “Ocean’s Deadliest” when he swam too close to the stingray, Stainton told reporters.
“He came on top of the stingray, and the stingray’s barb went up into his chest and put a hole into his heart,” said Stainton, who was on board Irwin’s boat, Croc One, at the time.
Crew members administered CPR and rushed to rendezvous with a rescue helicopter that flew to nearby Low Isle, but Irwin was pronounced dead when the paramedics arrived, Stainton said.
“The world has lost a great wild-life icon, a passionate conservationist and one of the proudest dads on the planet,” Stainton said. “He died doing what he loved best and left this world in a happy and peaceful state of mind. He would have said, ‘Crocs rule!’ “
Irwin was born Feb. 22, 1962, in the southern Australia city of Melbourne to a plumber father and a nurse mother, who decided a few years later to chase a shared dream of becoming involved in animal preservation.
They moved to the Sunshine Coast in tropical Queensland state and opened a reptile and wildlife preserve at Beerwah in 1970. Irwin said in a recent interview that he was in his element.
He was given a 12-foot scrub python for his 6th birthday and regularly went on capturing excursions with his father in bush land around the park. He was catching crocodiles by age 9, and in his 20s, he worked for the Queensland state government as a trapper, removing crocodiles from populated areas.
Irwin’s father, Bob, said his son had an innate affinity with animals from an early age, a sense Irwin later described as “a gift.”
In 1991, Irwin took over the park, Australia Zoo, when his parents retired.
He met and married Terri Raines, of Eugene, Ore., who had come to the park as a tourist that year. They invited a television crew to join them on their camping honeymoon.
The resulting show became the first “Crocodile Hunter.”