Steve Irwin: Steve Irwin was a hyper-enthusiastic, thrill-seeking Australian wildlife conservationist who gained a worldwide following with his television show The Crocodile Hunter. Last Monday Irwin (44) was swimming in shallow water off the northeastern Australian coastline, 60 miles north of Cairns, while filming a documentary, when a stingray's barbed tip punctured his heart.
He was following a fleet of the fish when one turned on him and fatally struck, an extraordinarily rare action. The jab from the 10-inch barb of a stingray seldom proves fatal. Footage of the incident showed Irwin pulling out the barb, but collapsing in the water. Irwin was taken by his boat, Croc One, to a rescue helicopter that flew to a nearby island. Despite attempts at resuscitation, he was pronounced dead before reaching a hospital.
Irwin was known for getting melodramatically near the claws and jaws of land and sea creatures. "While most shows use long lenses, we get right up close so the audience feels like they're smack in the middle of the bush," he once said. In the tradition of film-makers such as Jacques Cousteau, Irwin was credited with popularising wildlife science. He staked out animals in their habitats while talking to viewers in a whisper and keeping ever alert to a sighting. He was typically garbed in khaki shorts and short-sleeved shirts, giving him the appearance of an African explorer, and his shaggy blond hair, parted in the middle, gave him a friendly, boyish air.
He boasted of hand-feeding the world's most venomous snakes without being bitten. However, a 13-year-old female saltwater crocodile once took a large bite from part of his leg, a snack Irwin defended from the animal's perspective: "The poor little female was just defending herself."
He carved such a distinctive personality that he launched a mini business empire of toys and games based on his programmes. He starred in a feature film in 2002, The Crocodile Hunter: Collision Course, in which the CIA goes looking for a fallen satellite that has been swallowed by a crocodile.
He was a national icon in Australia, where prime minister John Howard invited Irwin to a prawns-and-Chablis barbecue welcoming President George W. Bush in 2003. To much derision, Irwin had called Howard "the greatest leader Australia has ever had and the greatest leader in the world", but he soon backed down by saying: "Oh, mate, politics. Give me a break. It's far safer in a crocodile farm."
At times, Irwin's derring-do led to negative press, most famously in 2004 when he cradled his infant son while feeding a dead chicken to crocodiles inside a zoo pen. He claimed that the child was never in danger, and Irwin was never charged with any crime.
When not filming his specials, Irwin and his American-born wife oversaw the Australia Zoo, a popular wildlife park started by his parents. He used part of his fortune to buy land for animal conservation, which he saw as imperative because of his country's massive land-clearing operations. He also helped lead efforts to save such endangered species . "Our whole passion to be on this planet is to educate people about wildlife," he said in 1998. "I will die doing that. I have a gift."
Stephen Robert Irwin was born on February 22nd, 1962, in Essendon, Victoria, near Melbourne.
His father worked as a plumber and his mother was a maternity nurse, but they were both amateur naturalists, and in 1970 they moved the family to the Queensland community of Beerwah on the Sunshine Coast. They bought four acres to start their zoo, which opened to the public in 1973 as the Queensland Reptile and Fauna Park.
Irwin spent much of his youth helping his parents nurse injured birds and raise kangaroos. At six, he was overjoyed when his parents bought him his very own 11ft-long scrub python as a birthday gift.
One of his defining early childhood experiences was "jumping" a crocodile in the Australian outback, with his father's permission. The father-son team caught with their bare hands or bred nearly all the 150 crocodiles at their park.
After high school, Irwin joined the government's crocodile management programme, a plan to relocate the aquatic reptile when they came into conflict with people, and he distinguished himself nationally in the art of crocodile capture.
His work also took him to Australian rain forests, and he became accomplished in studying goannas, a type of lizard.
"Living like a possum, I'd occasionally come down out of the trees for a feed," he wrote in a memoir. "Fortunately, God blessed me with orang-utan arms. To study arboreal animals, you've got to become one: I could climb anything."
In the early 1990s, he took over his parents' park and headed a cougar conservation effort. He also filmed a 10-hour television documentary about his work called The Crocodile Hunter. But the producer, John Stainton, was so mesmerised by Irwin's own amateur videotapes that Stainton persuaded an Australian network to devote an entire series to Irwin.
The show proved popular in limited syndication, and the Animal Planet cable channel began airing the programme in 1996. It became the channel's most popular offering, won a Daytime Emmy Award for best children's series and led to such spin-offs as Croc Files.
Robert J. Thompson, the founding director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University, said Irwin was the "consummate cable star" who "liberated the nature documentary from bounds of educational documentary" with his vaudeville-like comic touches.
In 1992, Irwin married an Oregon-born naturalist, Terri Raines, who became his filming and writing partner. She and their two young children, Bindi Sue and Robert, survive him.
Stephen Robert Irwin: born February 22nd, 1962; died September 4th, 2006