‘Going Wild’s’ Jeff Corwin Explores Untamed L.A.

As the enthusiastic and often fearless host of the Disney Channel’s “Going Wild With Jeff Corwin,” the naturalist has traveled to Africa, South America, Asia and Latin America to educate families on the wildlife indigenous to those areas and the need for preservation.

This Sunday, the intrepid Corwin comes face to face with the animals of Southern California, including a seemingly harmless but large rat in Beverly Hills.

“The property values are too high in Beverly Hills,” quips Corwin, relaxing in the Disney Channel’s offices in Burbank on a rare day off from his travels around the globe. “We need to take them down a little bit.”

Despite the show’s visits to exotic locations, one of the most popular episodes with fans last season was set in New York City. He hopes his excursion to the wilds of Los Angeles will be equally successful.

“It’s a great show, but it was hell to produce,” says Corwin, who shot the installment last spring. “It was supposed to be sunny Los Angeles, and we were stopping every five minutes to dry the water off the convertible and to make it look sunny. It was cold and freezing.”

But tons of fun. At the beach, Corwin encounters pelicans, sea urchins, decorator crabs and an octopus. He visits the set of the now-canceled “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman” in the Santa Monica Mountains, where he also spots a gray fox and a mule deer.

Biking into the Los Angeles River Basin, he encounters ducks and raccoons. And climbing the Hollywood Hills, he quietly sneaks up on a coyote.

“The ultimate goal for the show, the objective of ‘Going Wild’ and the Disney Channel, is to engage a family audience, so you have to have something in there for everybody,” explains Corwin, who fell in love with “critters” at the age of 6 when he encountered a snake at his aunt’s house.

“My interest is [to show] things that people aren’t familiar with and didn’t know were there,” he says. “Our objective is, ‘What can we really say about Los Angeles?’ They have got a big carnivorous animal [coyotes] and other animals roaming in the middle of an urban environment.”

Corwin received his bachelor of science degree in biology and anthropology from Bridgewater State University in Bridgewater, Mass. He’s addressed a conservation committee at the United Nations and published articles on the environment.

“I started traveling to the tropics when I was a teenager and fell in love with the rain forest,” Corwin says. “I was a director of a small rain forest foundation for a while, but by luck a documentary production that was taking place in Belize was looking for a young scientist to participate. I fell in love with the television process. [It was a way] to marry my love for natural history and my interest as an educator and communicator.”

Corwin always has a crew scout an area before he arrives, and he works with local biologists and advisors at each location.

“We try to be prepared,” he explains. “With something like the coyote, we worked with a coyote expert who had access to a coyote, who knew where this coyote was. This coyote was familiar with people, so we could sneak up on it and work with it.”

Frequently, Corwin and his crew must play a waiting game for their subjects. “We did a show in Costa Rica on the leatherback sea turtle, and it was during El Nin~o. It was 106 degrees, and the humidity was unbelievable. We slept on a bug-infested beach. I didn’t sleep. I had the shakes waiting for the turtle to come.

“Finally, I went for a walk on the beach [where] there was this leatherback coming up. It weighed about 2 tons. Then she saw me and went back into the water. I just broke down.”

The entire Costa Rican adventure, which repeats today, was pretty harrowing. “I was stung seven times by African killer bees on a beach. I got bit by a sloth on my pinky. I got bit by an anaconda on my thumb, which got infected. I was riding a horse cantering very fast, and I hit a tree branch. I had a big cut on my shoulder from that. It was so tough to sleep because the heat was so bad. I got on the plane with a cry and a quivering lip. I couldn’t wait to come home.”

Though he was taking a brief hiatus after this interview, Corwin was only halfway through shooting this season’s 26 episodes. “I am so sick of traveling,” he says with a sigh and a smile. “I just ran out of pages on my passport. I had to get new pages put in.”

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* “Going Wild With Jeff Corwin” airs Sundays at 6:25 p.m. and repeats the following Saturday at 6:25 p.m. on the Disney Channel.