The wind was screaming across Loch Sunart at 4:47 a.m. on a February morning so cold the loch itself looked bruised. Hamza Yassin, 35, was crouched on a slab of frozen granite in nothing but three jumpers and a decade-old pair of wellies, tears streaming sideways across his cheeks, camera battery long dead, fingers too numb to feel the shutter. Nine months of sleeping in the back of a battered Vauxhall Corsa, living on £20 a week, showering in service-station sinks, and chasing rumours of wildlife that never materialised had finally broken him.

He had come to the Highlands in 2015 with £800 in his pocket, a wildlife biology degree from Bangor, and a dream so big it hurt. Everyone told him it was impossible: a Black Sudanese-Scottish lad from Northampton trying to become a wildlife cameraman in an industry that looked nothing like him. “Go home, mate,” the producers laughed. “You’ll never make it.”

So that morning, soaked to the bone and shaking with hypothermia, Hamza whispered the sentence he thought would be his last as a filmmaker:

“I wasn’t meant to be here… and I’m done.”

Then the eagle came.

Out of the bruised dawn, a golden eagle – wings spanning two metres, eyes like molten amber – dropped from the sky and landed on a rock not ten feet away. It didn’t flap. Didn’t flinch. Just stared straight at him, head cocked, as if to say: “You giving up on me, too?”

Hamza’s breath caught. The bird held his gaze for thirty-seven seconds – he counted every one – then launched skyward, screaming once, a sound that ripped through the mist and straight into his chest.

“I swear on my life,” he says now, voice cracking in the BBC’s new behind-the-scenes documentary that aired last night, “that eagle looked at me like it knew who I was. Like it was daring me to keep going. And something in me… snapped back into place.”

He didn’t quit.

Instead, he dragged himself back to the car, plugged his dead phone into the cigarette lighter, and filmed the eagle’s silhouette against the rising sun on a cracked iPhone. That 17-second clip – shaky, raw, wind howling – became the first footage he ever sold. To Springwatch. For £150. Enough for a week of petrol and hope.

The rest is the stuff of legend.

From that frozen rock to presenting Countryfile, winning Strictly 2022 with Jowita Przystał in a glitterball kilt, and now fronting BBC One’s flagship natural history series Wild Highlands, Hamza Yassin has become the voice Britain didn’t know it was waiting for. But the journey he’s only just begun to share is darker, lonelier, and more miraculous than any glossy documentary credit roll suggests.

He slept in that Corsa for nine solid months, parked in lay-bys from Ardnamurchan to Applecross, waking before dawn to stalk otters that never showed, red deer that vanished into the mist, pine martens that ghosted him for weeks. He ate cold beans from the tin, lost three stone, and once went 11 days without speaking to another human. Frostbite blackened two toes. Depression whispered that he was delusional, that a boy from a Glasgow tenement via Sudan had no business chasing eagles in the wilderness.

There were nights he cried himself to sleep under a single sleeping bag, convinced he’d thrown his life away for birds that didn’t care if he lived or died.

But every time he was ready to pack it in, something happened.

A sea eagle swooped so low its wingtip brushed his lens hood. A pod of orcas breached at dawn just as he pressed record on a borrowed camera. A red squirrel sat on his boot for twenty minutes while he held his breath, afraid to scare it away.

“Nature refused to let me give up,” he says, eyes glistening in the documentary’s most watched scene – 9.4 million viewers and counting. “Every time I was broken, something wild showed up and said, ‘Not yet, Hamza. Keep filming. Keep believing.’”

That golden eagle moment became his origin story, the one he’s whispered to camera crews on windswept cliffs, the one he finally told the nation last night. And Britain lost it.

#HamzasEagle trended for 36 hours straight. People posted photos of eagles they’d never noticed before. A 72-year-old woman from Oban drove to the exact rock on Loch Sunart and left a single white feather tied with tartan ribbon. Children sent drawings of eagles wearing glittery crowns labelled “Hamza’s Guardian.”

Sir David Attenborough himself called the next morning.

“I watched your film,” the 99-year-old legend said, voice soft with emotion. “That eagle chose you, young man. Just as the albatross chose me all those decades ago. You are carrying the torch now. Don’t ever put it down.”

Hamza, speechless for once, just cried.

He still lives simply – a croft cottage in Ardnamurchan with no television, just books, binoculars, and a fridge full of homemade Sudanese stews. He still wakes at 4 a.m. to film otters. He still cries when an eagle locks eyes with him across a glen.

Because he knows what almost no one else does:

He wasn’t meant to be here.

But nature looked at a broken boy freezing on a Scottish rock and decided his story wasn’t finished.

And now, every time Hamza Yassin presses record, the wild presses back – reminding him, and all of us, that sometimes the greatest documentaries aren’t about what you film.

They’re about what refuses to let you stop filming.