Wildlife didn't scare Steve Irwin. Most wildlife, anyway. "Parrots make me nervous," he once said, adding, "but I still love them."
In the end, it was a stingray that did in the internationally famous khaki-clad star of Crocodile Hunter. A run-in with the sea creature in waters near Australia's Great Barrier Reef killed Irwin on Monday. He was 44.
According to eMedicineHealth.com, stingray attacks are typically defensive and rarely fatal--unless a barb, a jagged part of the stingray's stinger along its spine, punctures a person's stomach or heart. Irwin apparently suffered the latter fate--a shot to the heart.
"He came up on top of the stingray, and the stingray's barb went up and into his chest and put a hole in his heart," John Stainton, Irwin's longtime director and producer, told reporters in Australia.
Irwin was filming a new TV special at the time of the accident. Its title: Ocean's Deadliest.
CPR was administered to Irwin at the scene. He was pronounced dead at a local hospital.
"I'm a wildlife warrior," Irwin told CNN's Larry King in 2004. "A warrior is someone who is trained or engaged in battle. My battle is conservation."
Irwin was born into the wild, as it were. His parents, Bob and Lyn Irwin, founded the Australia Zoo in 1970. By the age of 9, the young Irwin was catching crocodiles with his own hands.
Over the years, Irwin once estimated to E! Online, he was bitten "thousands of times by [non-venomous] snakes, crocs and lizards."
Such things--bites, jaws, fangs--didn't faze Irwin. As he explained to USA Weekend in 2000, he was a man on a mission: "I choose to get in close, so people can care about the animals."
Irwin assumed command of the Australia Zoo in 1991. A year later, he starred in a documentary for Australian TV, The Crocodile Hunter. The show became a hit. The hit became a series. The series came to the United States, via cable's Animal Planet, in 1996.
Soon, Irwin was a pop-culture fixture--the enthusiastic guy in shorts running around, risking limb--if not life--yelling, "Crikey!" Invariably, he became a favorite on the talk-show circuit--the pumped-up Joan Embery for the extreme-sports generation.
Irwin went on to star in other series, including Croc Files and New Breed Vets, and appeared in the animal-populated comedy, Dr. Dolittle 2.
In 2002, Irwin starred in the big-screen vehicle The Crocodile Hunter: Collision Course. His costar, onscreen and off, was wife Terri, whom he wed in 1992.
The Irwins had two children, daughter Bindi Sue, 8, and Robert, 2.
It was in January 2004, when Robert was one month old, that Steve Irwin came under scrutiny for holding the baby boy in his arms while feeding a crocodile. The incident raised questions of child endangerment and invited comparisons to Michael Jackson's baby-dangling hotel-balcony episode.
Irwin was adamant that he was no bad dad.
"My intention was strictly and only to show people he's my little baby boy," Irwin told Larry King in 2004. "I would never endanger my son, as you wouldn't yours nor any good father."
Later that year, Irwin was back on the hot seat for a TV special called Ice Breaker, in which he was accused of getting too chummy with penguins and other Antarctica animals governed by Australia conservation law. As with the baby incident, Irwin was cleared of any wrongdoing.
In recounting his career to the Animal Planet Website, Irwin allowed he'd had "many, many close calls" in his line of work.
"Too numerous to mention, really."