The Crocodile Hunter's Last Adventure

Nov. 3, 2006 — -- In August, just before his death, the "Crocodile Hunter" Steve Irwin led a scientific expedition -- no fans, no film crews, no autograph seekers -- to study the world's largest and most dangerous crocodile.

Those close to him say it may have been his greatest adventure.

Ethan Watters takes an inside look at Irwin's final mission for the magazine Men's Journal.

Read an excerpt from the Men's Journal article below.

Steve Irwin's Greatest Adventure

By Ethan Watters

At the beginning of August, Steve Irwin, 44 years old, faced an almost endless series of television projects. In the months ahead he was contracted to play the gregarious, fearless Aussie in several big specials for Animal Planet and in a Travel Channel series. His daughter, eight-year-old Bindi, was about to star in her own series, with Irwin as a guest host. Once they finished filming he'd have to fly to Los Angeles and New York to promote his shows. It was a rewarding but demanding schedule, and sometimes his hard-earned notoriety took a toll. On past press trips he'd hide for whole days in his hotel room to avoid the mobs of idiots who liked to bellow "Crikey!" in his face.

And so, before plunging in, he went on vacation. For four blissful weeks Irwin unwound from hunting crocs as a television personality by hunting crocs as a scientist. With his family and a crew of 30 men, he embarked on an expedition up Australia's Kennedy River in Lakefield National Park in Northern Queensland. He trapped and released 49 estuarine crocodiles in a month, outfitting the beasts with sophisticated devices to track them via satellite telemetry.

No film crew buzzed around the famed Crocodile Hunter, no cameraman told him to kiss the snake again, no sound tech complained that he had broken yet another radio microphone. "This has been the best month of my life," Irwin told Professor Craig Franklin, his friend and partner on the trip. "I've been surrounded by all the things that I love."

"He was truly in his element," remembers Franklin, a professor of life sciences at the University of Queensland. "He was in the Australian bush. He was surrounded by his wife and two children. And he was helping make world-first discoveries about the animal that he loved the most."

It was little known, even to his ardent fans, that Irwin spent his free time collecting data on the estuarine crocodile. Also called a saltwater crocodile (Irwin used the term "super croc" on one episode he filmed about it), it's not only the largest class of croc in the world but the most likely to have what the Australian park service delicately calls a "negative interaction with a human" -- such as biting one in half.

Knowing how these creatures moved would not only be groundbreaking science, it had the potential to save lives of both man and beast. As Franklin and others see it, the research Irwin did on these monstrous reptiles will be his most lasting legacy.

Franklin caught a bumpy flight into Cairns, then rattled over dirt roads for seven hours until, late at night, he reached Lakefield National Park, where Irwin had prepared their campsite. When the professor rose at five the next morning, Irwin, already awake, greeted him with a handshake and a bear hug.

They were resuming a friendship they'd begun four years earlier in the same park. At the time Franklin, there to perform research, knew the Crocodile Hunter from television -- or he thought he did. The Steve Irwin he met proved just as enthusiastic and passionate as he was on camera, but Franklin was caught off guard by the depth of Irwin's scientific knowledge.