词条 | Irwin, Steve |
释义 | Irwin, Steve Australian wildlife conservationist and television personality in full Stephen Robert Irwin born Feb. 22, 1962, Essendon, Vic., Austl. died Sept. 4, 2006, off the coast of Port Douglas, Queens. ![]() Irwin derived his passion for wildlife from his parents, who participated in early efforts to protect Australia's wild reptiles. In 1970 the family moved from Victoria to Queensland's Sunshine Coast, where Bob and Lyn Irwin founded the Beerwah Reptile Park on 4 acres (1.6 hectare) of land. The young Irwin accompanied his father on expeditions in the Outback to trap lizards, poisonous snakes, and crocodiles, and he helped to nurse and rehabilitate the injured or abandoned kangaroos, wallabies, and birds that the park took in. In the early 1970s Irwin accompanied his father on expeditions for the East Coast Crocodile Management Program, a government-sponsored project to reduce crocodile hunting by relocating the animals to less-populated areas or to sanctuaries, including the Beerwah park. It was on one such outing, when Irwin was age nine, that he first attempted to subdue a crocodile by jumping on its back. He soon became quite adept at the technique. In the early 1980s Irwin worked for the Crocodile Management Program on his own, sometimes spending months alone in the bush in search of the animals. Skilled at capturing the largest and most dangerous crocodiles, he eventually acquired a reputation as Australia's top “croc catcher.” Irwin recorded some of his exploits on tape using a video camera mounted on a tripod. Hired as a consultant for a television commercial, he showed some of the tapes to a producer at Australia's Channel 10 network, who immediately suggested turning them into a documentary. The result was a 10-hour program, The Crocodile Hunter, which first aired in Australia in 1992. Its immediate success led to additional documentaries and eventually to a regular series, which featured Irwin in new adventures both inside and outside Australia. In 1996 the program was picked up by the Discovery Channel network in the United States. In 2006, the year of Irwin's death, it was regularly broadcast in more than 100 countries. ![]() Meanwhile, Irwin's popularity as a television personality helped to turn the Beerwah park, renamed the Australia Zoo in 1992, into a major tourist attraction; it expanded to 16 acres (6.5 hectares) and 550 animals by 2000 and to 80 acres (32 hectares) and more than 1,000 animals by 2007. In addition to running the zoo, the Irwins established large private wildlife refuges in Australia and founded an international organization, Wildlife Warriors Worldwide, to promote wildlife conservation, education, and research. In his television series and in numerous interviews, Irwin emphasized the importance of protecting threatened and endangered species of all kinds. Asked about the infectious excitement of his Crocodile Hunter adventures, he said, I believe that education is all about being excited about something.…That's the main aim in our entire lives is to promote education about wildlife and wilderness areas, save habitats, save endangered species, etc. So, if we can get people excited about animals, then by crikey, it makes it a heck of a lot easier to save them. In September 2006, while filming a documentary called The Ocean's Deadliest near Australia's Great Barrier Reef, Irwin swam over a venomous bull stingray (ray) in shallow water, inadvertently provoking the animal to attack. He was stung in the chest and immediately went into cardiac arrest, and he was pronounced dead less than an hour later. |
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