We've Lost an All-Too-Rare Human Connection to the Animal World

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PHOTOGRAPH BY LIONEL HAHN/ABACA PRESS

Steve Irwin 1962-2006

   I've been unexpectedly sad all week over the death of "Crocodile Hunter" Steve Irwin. I say unexpectedly, because I wasn't exactly a regular viewer of his show on Discovery's Animal Planet channel. In fact, I'm not even sure I ever sat through an entire episode.

   But even if you weren't an avid fan, you couldn't help being delighted by the exuberant Aussie, dressed in his trademark khaki shirt and shorts, cradling and cooing over creatures most of us wouldn't exactly call "beautiful," much less cozy up to.

   Most Americans couldn't tell you the name of Australia's prime minister, but we knew who Irwin was: an ordinary bloke with blue-collar roots who loved to wrestle crocodiles. He made it easy to forget that he wasn't invincible.

   "If I'm going to die," the 44-year-old naturalist joked in a 2002 interview, "at least I want it filmed."

   Tragically, he got his wish. On Sept. 4, while shooting a documentary called ``Ocean's Deadliest'' in the Great Barrier Reef, a stingray's barb pierced his heart as he swam above it.

   Moments after he yanked it out, he was dead. Stingrays' strikes are rarely fatal, so it was an especially cruel twist of fate.

   In the first public comments by Irwin's family since the tragedy, his father, Bob Irwin, who started the wildlife park that his son turned into a major tourist attraction, said they were aware of the inherent dangers of their work.

   "Both of us over the years have had some very close shaves, and we both approached it the same way: we made jokes about it," he said. "That's not to say we were careless. But we treated it as part of the job. Nothing to worry about really."

   More natural celebrity than trained biologist, Irwin successfully built his career around a passion that stirred in childhood, when his father, a plumber at the time, taught him to catch crocodiles in the rivers of North Queensland.

   "That's what my hand and my brains are designed to do," he once said. "That's what I have to give to the world."

   We all know people who lovingly and skillfully connect with animals, but generally not the type with giant jaws, claws and venom. In Irwin's risky exploits, we saw the rarest of gifts: the ability to understand and communicate with all varieties of creatures, especially the panic-inducing kind.

   "If you love the snake, and if you sincerely love it, it will ooze out through your hands," he once said. "If you can avoid being hit in the first 30 seconds, pretty soon the snake will understand that you're not trying to kill it."

   Irwin's fearlessness and willingness to go anywhere were what won him so many fans. While more staid scientists and conservationists were solemnly lecturing about habitats and ecosystems and endangered species, he was off giving us a front-row look at wildlife.

   Two years ago, he was criticized for being a little too wild: when he dangled a piece of meat for a crocodile on one hand while holding his 1-month-old baby boy with the other. He didn't think he did anything wrong. If his kids were going to live around crocodiles, he told ``Today's'' Matt Lauer, they needed to get used to it.

   Maybe what was so alarming to us about the baby incident was just how perfectly at home Irwin was with the wildness. Our own lives, for the most part, are predictably tame. Our boxed-in society has a way of moving us away from the natural world, making it too easy to lose our respect for the planet: and, even worse, to lose our awe.

   But here was Steve Irwin, wrapping himself in an anaconda or cuddling a croc, putting us in touch with where the wild things are. We relied on him to move us beyond our fears and into the marvelous, complicated world around us.

   Now that he's gone, we've not only lost this larger-than-life character, we've also lost that connection. And perhaps that's what we're going to miss most of all.

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