By Alysa TeichmanDaily Northwestern

Jeff Corwin discovered his passion for naturalism when he walked inside his grandmother’s house with a garter snake dangling from his arm. She and his father looked at each other, and his grandmother, notoriously strict, screamed at the 6-year-old boy to get rid of it.

As he tells it, Corwin looked up at his grandmother and said, “No,” without a trace of hesitation.

He spent the next two years of his life in his grandparents’ backyard, following that same snake and learning many of the most important lessons of his life: reproduction, regurgitation and the way snakes shed their skin, to name a few.

Corwin, now an Animal Planet icon and star of “The Jeff Corwin Experience” and “Corwin’s Quest,” delivered a colorful presentation Wednesday in mostly filled Tech Auditorium, drawing laughter with stories about how his experiences with animals have shaped his beliefs.

“We have always gone for more political speakers, but this time we wanted to go the fun celebrity route,” said Students for Ecological and Environmental Development co-chair Tommy Sunderland, a Weinberg senior, whose group sponsored the event.

Corwin said his belief in conservation “crystallized” about two years after the living room incident, when his grandmother’s neighbor saw him next to the snake and killed it with a spade.

“My view of conservation has changed since then,” Corwin said. “I do it now because of my child. Her life will be less rich than mine because of our behavior and inability to make good decisions.”

The audience giggled when Corwin told stories about encounters with animals and answered questions from the audience. Asked to describe his most terrifying animal encounter, he said, “It definitely had to be the 27th hour of my wife’s 29 hours of labor.”

Corwin’s most harrowing moments have been encounters with people, not animals, he said. He was in Cambodia during a coup d’etat, in a train accident in India and surrounded by Maoist rebels in Darjeeling.

“People do far more scary things than animals,” Corwin said.

He also recounted serious stories that gave his life meaning, like the time he put a 3-month old, 270-pound elephant to sleep on his shoulder. He later woke up to its rustling and noticed that the elephant’s trunk was spinning strands of his hair.

“This moment really had meaning when I had my own daughter,” Corwin said.

Along with the anecdotes, Corwin discussed his ideas about ecological sustainability.

“How do you leave a footprint behind that is beneficial to our world? For me, it’s sustainability,” Corwin said.

His experiences working with near-extinct animals brought a sense of urgency to his conservation efforts. He once worked with the last of a species of Honeycreeper bird, and later received an e-mail informing him that the bird had contracted Malaria from a mosquito.

“It was a very powerful moment,” Corwin said. “I realized that I was actually seeing extinction before my very eyes.”

An Emmy winner and one of People Magazine’s “50 Most Beautiful People,” Corwin’s rise to stardom came only with persistence.

“I believed I could do it no matter what people said,” Corwin said. “When I won my Emmy it was a great coup moment because I saw the producer who rejected a tape I submitted in 1994.”

In his evolution from a 6-year-old fascinated by snakes to an international television celebrity, he has picked up tricks from the animals he works with. For example, he can now look at an animal’s feces and recognize not only its species, but also its fiber intake.

“There’s a whole story you can learn from animals,” Corwin said.

Reach Alysa Teichman at [email protected].