Jeff Corwin (6 page)

Jeff says, “What a kick in the pants to produce children that will inherit an unhealthy world. We spend all this time investing in medicine, health care, and clothing. But the most important thing we can do for them is give them a healthy planet. My love for nature comes from my love for animals, my fascination for the natural world, and my concern for the future of our natural heritage. But now I’m a conservationist because I have children. I am biologically contributing to the next generation. I have an obligation to ensure that they have the resources that I have had.”

But, sadly, Jeff feels as though our generation has had moments of failure that cannot be corrected. Since Maya was born, there are species of animals that have become extinct. Maya will never have an opportunity to know them or see them firsthand.

After becoming a father, Jeff learned how hard it can be to make time for both his work life and his family life. He loves being a father; it is the most important job he has. But at the same time, he knows he has to take advantage of opportunities that build his career and keep him in the eyes of the public. And that means he has to travel and be away from his family quite often.

Jeff travels as much as ten months each year, and he finds it hard to be away from his family. While it’s not possible to take them on most of his trips, Jeff does sometimes bring his family on the road. Maya has been to Central America, Africa, and throughout the United States—all before the age of five. Jeff remembers, “Maya spent her first birthday with a picnic lunch and a giraffe at a wildlife center in South Africa.” That’s one well-traveled little girl! Jeff continues, “The payoff of all the hard work is that my family gets to experience things others do not, and develop an appreciation for this great planet that we live on.”

To round out Jeff’s amazing year, 2003 was also when Jeff took his interest in teaching people about nature and conservation to another level. Jeff wrote his first book,
Living on the Edge: Amazing Relationships in the Natural World
. The title of the book refers to the idea that wildlife lives on the edge, just like Jeff does!

Since the age of twelve, it’s been Jeff’s dream to write a book. In an interview about the book, Jeff said, “I always dreamed of two things: hosting an animal show on TV and writing a book. Now I can say I’ve done both.” Jeff is very proud of his first book. He poured his heart into it, and even took most of the photographs that appear in it.

In all of Jeff ’s work, whether it be books, television, or public speaking, he tries to teach one important message: we are all responsible for sustainable using, or saving Earth’s natural resources. If we don’t do it, the next generation will have to pay the price! Jeff feels that our worth as people can be measured by how we treat our planet. That’s why Jeff stresses the importance of using Earth’s resources in a way that will allow future generations to use them, too. We should aim to pass on a planet that is as biodiverse, healthy, biologically rich, and ecologically stable as it is now. And we should try to make it even more so!

To further this cause, Jeff joined the board of directors of Defenders of Wildlife in 2004. Defenders of Wildlife is a national, nonprofit organization that protects America’s native animals and plants by educating people and helping them act on behalf of nature. Defenders of Wildlife has a hands-on, real-world, and practical approach to protecting resources. They work with lawmakers and the government to help create laws that protect animals. Jeff is impressed by their original solutions to conservation challenges. He is honored to be a part of such a great organization.

While Jeff certainly had a lot on his plate, he was still hungry for more! So, in June 2005, Jeff signed on to create another Animal Planet program, called
Corwin’s Quest
. The series was filmed over many months on five continents and focuses on a theme for each episode, such as “sound” or “extremes,” rather than the location.
Corwin’s Quest
brings viewers face-to-face with blue whales, reticulated pythons, vervet monkeys, Mexican free-tailed bats, desert scorpions, killer snails, and everything in between. And, as usual, Jeff had a wild time with his animal costars.

While filming one episode of
Corwin’s Quest
, Jeff found himself swimming with great white sharks off the coast of South Africa. Great whites are the largest meat-eating shark in the ocean. They can reach more than twenty feet in length. They have enormous, razor-sharp teeth—sometimes up to three thousand of them at a time! Great whites are predators at the top of the marine ecosystem, making them important to the health of oceans. They generally hunt marine mammals such as sea lions, seals, and dolphins.

Jeff was cage diving to study the sharks. That means he was lowered into the ocean inside a protective steel cage. From inside the safety of the cage, Jeff could film and study the sharks.

In order to be able to breathe while he was under water, Jeff was wearing a heavy dome-shaped metal helmet that had oxygen pumped into it through a tube. It was so heavy that it took two people to put it on. If something went wrong, it wasn’t possible for him to get it off by himself.

Suddenly, the fresh oxygen wasn’t replacing the carbon dioxide Jeff was breathing out fast enough. Jeff began to sweat and feel uncomfortable. He started to panic, and signaled the other divers and crew for help. But nobody seemed to see him! So in order to save himself, Jeff squirmed out of the shark cage. He swam toward the surface of the water and was about to be pulled back onto the boat. And that was precisely the moment when a sixteen-foot great white shark swam up behind Jeff.

The shark circled within only a few feet of Jeff, who was still bobbing around in the ocean. Great whites, or any other type of shark, rarely attack human beings. Jeff’s crew remained calm and dragged Jeff back into the boat. It wasn’t until after Jeff was safe that the crew informed him that he had gone swimming with a great white shark!

For another episode of
Corwin’s Quest
, Jeff jumped off one of the world’s highest bridges. That’s right, Jeff jumped off a bridge! But he didn’t do it just the one time. Jeff plunged from a six-hundred-foot bridge in Italy
ten
times! He was attached to a bungee cord, of course, and had a 16-mm video camera attached to his chest. And he did it all in the name of science.

The goal was to compare the speed of Jeff’s fall against that of a trained falcon. But the bird didn’t cooperate the first time, so Jeff had to keep bungee jumping until he got the shot he needed. For each bungee jump, Jeff stood on the rail of the bridge staring down at the rocks below. That’s right—there were rocks, not water, below him! Whenever the falcon trainer was ready to release the bird, Jeff was told to jump. Jeff said it was very scary to jump off something so high.

After each jump, Jeff hung upside down four hundred feet in the air until he was lifted back up again. He says, “My back was killing me.” It got to the point that Jeff was in too much pain to continue doing more takes. So a member of the crew was chosen to be Jeff’s stunt double for the last few jumps. Normally, Jeff does his own stunts, but this time, he was relieved to have a stand-in!

In another episode, the show was being filmed in Uganda, Africa. Jeff and his crew found themselves in the middle of what is known as a chimp hunt. A chimp hunt is a phenomenon in which a group of about twenty to thirty chimpanzees organizes to attack simultaneously another group of smaller animals. It is a group hunting behavior rarely caught on film.

In this case, Jeff and his crew watched as chimps moved in toward a group of about fifty colobus monkeys in the treetops. Some of the larger chimps climbed into the trees, moving up to the branches where the colobus were. Other chimps stayed on the ground to capture any colobus monkeys that might fall or try to escape by way of the ground.

The colobus leaped from branch to branch, tree to tree, and even over a two-hundred-foot ravine to try to escape. It was a matter of life and death for the medium- to large-size monkeys, so they would do anything to survive the attack. But it was also a matter of life and death for the chimps, too, who needed to eat. Jeff didn’t know which animal to root for! In the end, the chimps captured a few of their prey, and rejoiced in their meal. Jeff felt proud of the chimps for the capture, but also felt awful for the poor colobus victims. Nonetheless, it was marvelous for him to witness.

On another trip to Africa for
Corwin’s Quest
, Jeff was in the mountains of Uganda searching for gorillas. He had been feeling ill during the entire trip, and had lost a lot of weight. He eventually came to realize that he was very sick with malaria and African tick fever,
at the same time
! It was a taxing trip for Jeff’s health, certainly. But he pushed through, taking off only one day from filming. And in the end, it paid off! After days of endless trekking, Jeff found himself sitting just a few feet away from an entire troop of gorillas, including the amazing giant silverback gorilla!

It was also for
Corwin’s Quest
that Jeff had his teeth cleaned by a live shrimp! Jeff wanted to show viewers how cool cleaner shrimp are. Cleaner shrimp are very valuable to the coral reef community. They survive on tiny, parasitic crustaceans and dead skin. These things often build up on fish, so cleaner shrimp remove them. The cleaner shrimp have a meal and the fish can swim free of irritation—everybody wins! Several cleaner shrimp will clean a single fish at a time. They dash around over the fish’s body, munching away the parasites.

To show how this process works, Jeff ate a large meal, and was sure to leave bits of food in his teeth. Then he went scuba diving in the ocean near the Great Barrier Reef, off the coast of Australia. Jeff found a cleaner shrimp and put it to work. He put the live shrimp in his mouth, and the cleaner shrimp proceeded to eat the food remains from Jeff’s teeth!

 

For the next several years, Jeff’s career continued to thrive. He was experiencing tremendous success in all areas of his life, and having a great time doing it. But he wanted to do a project that reached a new audience. That’s why he approached the news network CNN with the idea for a new TV series called
Planet in Peril
.

Jeff’s idea was to show people how environmental conditions are interconnected: climate change, habitat loss, pollution, and human population growth. Each of these problems affects the next. In an interview with
UMass Magazine Online
, Jeff once explained, “Everything is knotted together to make one great living fabric.”

CNN really liked the idea, so they agreed to make the show. Jeff had appeared on CNN many times as an animal expert, so it was rewarding for him to present them with an idea, then see it come to fruition.

In 2007,
Planet in Peril
aired as a four-hour documentary that examined our changing planet. It also featured correspondents Anderson Cooper and Dr. Sanjay Gupta. To create the series, Jeff traveled the globe, from the Brazilian rain forest to the arctic tundra. He was greatly affected by what he saw during filming. For example, when Jeff was in Southeast Asia, he walked into silent rain forests. They were silent because every bird, lizard, and mammal was gone, and had likely died.

During his time in Madagascar, an island off the coast of Africa, Jeff found himself feeling bittersweet. He realized that he could potentially discover a new species there. But at the same time, anything he discovered would probably not survive long because its habitat was being completely destroyed by humans.

Jeff also traveled to the North Pole to study polar bears for the series. He had the chance to work side by side with one of the world’s best biologists, tracking and observing the bears. Polar bears are one of nature’s most powerful predators, but Jeff says, “Their future is uncertain due to climate change.”

Jeff recalls staring out onto an abyss of ice, being awestruck by nature’s power, and how cold it was! He says the temperatures were around 60 degrees below freezing, and that every time he had a runny nose from the cold, there was an instant icicle hanging from the tip of his nose!

It was during the filming of
Planet in Peril
that Jeff had one of his most frightening animal experiences. An Asian elephant attacked him. The incident happened on March 22, 2007, in the country of Cambodia, in Southeast Asia.

Jeff was reporting on Cambodia’s wild elephant population. As little as one hundred years ago, there were thousands of Asian elephants in the rain forests of Southeast Asia. But today, Asian elephants are nearly extinct in the wild. There are only about thirty thousand of them left. This is because humans are tearing down the forests in which they live, and because humans kill elephants for their tusks.

Jeff was at a wildlife rehabilitation center, where he was helping workers handle three of the elephants. Twice a day, every day, the elephants were taken to a lagoon to be washed and exercised. Jeff was talking to Anderson Cooper and turned his back on one of the elephants. Elephants are complicated animals that experience emotions, such as happiness, anger, and jealousy. When Jeff turned away, the pachyderm decided to let Jeff know he didn’t want to be ignored.

Suddenly, the enormous elephant was right over Jeff’s shoulder. Before Jeff could react, the elephant grabbed Jeff’s arm in his mouth and thrashed Jeff back and forth several times. Asian elephants grow to be as much as twenty-one feet long, stand up to ten feet tall, and weigh up to eleven thousand pounds. They are thousands of times stronger than humans. In fact, the trunk of an elephant can lift a seven-hundred-pound tree limb. So in the creature’s mouth, Jeff was nothing more than a rag doll.

When the elephant grabbed Jeff, he instantly crushed many of the muscles, ligaments, and tendons in Jeff’s arm. Jeff screamed, and thought he might black out from the pain. Within seconds, the elephant handlers stepped in. They got the elephant to release Jeff from its jaws. If the handlers had not reacted as quickly as they did, Jeff probably would have died.