Animals join Corwin on stage for final DSS talk

For the first time in its 35-year history, animals shared the stage with a human presenter in UB’s Distinguished Speakers Series Tuesday evening at the Center for the Arts Mainstage.

Jeff Corwin, host of ABC’s “Wildlife Nation” and a renowned conservationist and environmental journalist, shared tales of his globe-trotting adventures with all manner of animal species before an appreciative audience that included many school-age children. Animals gracing the stage included slithering reptiles, birds of prey and a baby sloth whose adorable visage was captured close-up through the adroit camera work of an accompanying videographer.

Though Corwin kept the audience entertained with quips and one-liners, his underlying message was deadly serious: The animal kingdom faces enormous environmental and conservation challenges brought on by human endeavors, yet solutions do exist, he said. At several points, audience members, including both adults and teens, were invited to the stage to directly encounter the animals, while Corwin discussed their characteristics and evolutionary journey.

“Tonight’s going to be epic,” Corwin promised the crowd, following introductory remarks by Provost A. Scott Weber and Stephanie Poindexter, assistant professor of anthropology. Before bringing the animals on stage, Corwin noted how, growing up in an urban environment in Massachusetts, he awakened to wildlife at age 6 after encountering a reptile in his grandparents’ backyard. He traced his commitment to conservationism to his dismay when, at age 8, a neighbor killed his snake, Gladys. “That’s when I realized good people make bad decisions when you don’t give them good information.”

Audience member Steve, celebrating his birthday, was the first to be invited to hold an animal — in Steve’s case, a tegu, which Corwin called “a distinctly American lizard” found in the southern part of South America. Corwin described the tegu’s forked tongue and how “it’s really critical to how [the tegu] navigates through his world.” This particular tegu came from Florida where, like other animals in the program, he “was once someone’s pet.”

Corwin then brought out a gila monster from the American Southwest, one of only two species of lizards that are “truly venomous.” He described its “incredible marbling coloration” and its penchant for the subterranean. “This is a creature that can spend nine months underground in a surreal life in a burrow of its own, or the burrow of a desert tortoise. … This is a creature that faced many challenges to survive, a species that’s based on longevity for survival. They can live for well over a century.”

Corwin also welcomed two local birds of prey cared for by area wildlife rescue organizations — a screech owl and a great horned owl — before presenting a baby sloth that drew a collective “awe” from the audience. “Such an incredibly cool creature,” Corwin said of this species native to the treetops of Central and South America. Their greatest challenge, he said, is their diminishing wildlife habitat. Indeed, the loss of rainforest acreage equates to “massive trees, plants and animals the size of the United Kingdom scraped off our Earth every year.”

Another crowd-pleaser was an anteater, a cousin of the sloth although quite different in appearance. This animal briefly crawled on stage and seemed headed to the Mainstage floor if it hadn’t been lovingly restrained by a member of Corwin’s team. “What you’ll notice is that it has very, very sharp claws,” said Corwin. “It’ll use those sharp claws to dig, prowl, excavate. It has a long tongue that is almost as long as the distance from here to here,” Corwin said, holding his hands about two feet apart to demonstrate.

Also on the program were an echidna from Australia and an alligator from the American South. Perhaps the highlight of the evening was Corwin’s reveal of an anaconda snake held by five enthusiastic, if mildly apprehensive, volunteers.

“Did you guys enjoy these animals?” Corwin asked, before turning to a series of audience questions. Cheers and whistles were the unambiguous reply. During the Q&A, Corwin lamented the loss of coral reefs in Florida (“It’s so bad that that corals can no longer reproduce by spawning in the wild”) and described vital environmental and conservation measures, in particular, the elimination of single-use plastics. Corwin contrasted the “30 minutes of hydration” while drinking from a plastic water bottle on a hot summer day, versus the 400 years that very plastic will live in a landfill.

Among hopeful environmental factors, Corwin pointed to the country’s “incredible” national and state park systems. And he described the interconnectedness of issues such as habitat loss, wildlife exploitation, environmental degradation and climate change. He spoke with pride about “Wildlife Nation” and his partnership with Defenders of Wildlife. Describing problems such as the coral reefs in Florida — which have decreased by 40% to 50% in the past decade — Corwin said “these are really big challenges we face on our planet. But the power is in the storytelling and in working with people who are moving hell and high water to save [the ecosystem]. It’s about wildlife but it’s actually a story about people.”

Corwin’s lecture, the final Distinguished Speakers Series talk for 2021-22, was presented, in part, by the College of Arts and Sciences.