It was 3:17 a.m. on a wind-lashed February night in 2023 when BBC Scotland’s live wildlife camera caught something no one had scripted. In the black mirror of a Highland loch, a lone figure in a battered green jacket crouched motionless on the bank. A female otter surfaced, three pups tumbling behind her like furry commas. Instead of retreating, she swam straight toward the man, sniffed the air, and then — impossibly — let out a soft chirrup. The man answered with the exact same call. The otter tilted her head, curious, unafraid. For the next eight minutes the pair held a whispered conversation while the pups played tag around his boots. Over 1.2 million people watched live. By morning #OtterWhisperer was trending worldwide. The man was Hamza Yassin, and Britain had just fallen irreversibly in love.

Two and a half years later, the same soft-spoken Sudanese-Scottish ranger has quietly, relentlessly, become the most powerful voice in British nature television. At 35, Hamza Yassin is not merely a presenter; he is the living embodiment of what happens when unbridled joy meets forensic wildlife knowledge meets cinematic storytelling. In 2025 alone he has fronted three flagship BBC series (Wild Isles: The Hidden Highlands, Britain’s Secret Seas, and the forthcoming Christmas blockbuster Snow Tracks), won a BAFTA for Best Presenter, and been crowned National Geographic’s Adventurer of the Year. David Attenborough, now 99, called him “the future” in a rare on-camera handover moment that reduced grown cameramen to tears. Yet Hamza still lives in the same tiny stone bothy on the Ardnamurchan peninsula, still rises at 3 a.m. to film badgers, and still answers every single child’s letter that arrives covered in otter stickers.

So how did a boy who arrived in the UK at age eight speaking no English become the man Britain now trusts to tell its wildest stories?

From Desert Dust to Highland Mist

Hamza Ahmed Yassin was born in 1990 in the dusty outskirts of Omdurman, Sudan, where the Nile splits into its White and Blue arteries. His earliest memories are of heat, goats, and his grandmother’s tales of djinn living in acacia trees. When civil unrest made Khartoum increasingly unsafe, his parents — both teachers — made the hardest decision of their lives: send eight-year-old Hamza and his younger brother to boarding school in cold, distant Britain. He landed in Northampton with one suitcase, a Quran, and the phone number of a family friend. “I cried for six months straight,” he laughs now, the memory still raw. “I thought rain was the sky being broken.”

But nature became his second language long before English did. Weekends were spent at local wildlife rescues — owls with broken wings, hedgehogs rescued from bonfires. By 14 he was volunteering at RSPB reserves, lying flat in muddy fields for hours just to photograph a lapwing’s crest. At 16 he won Young Wildlife Photographer of the Year with a haunting shot of a red deer stag silhouetted against a burning moor — an image that still hangs in the Scottish Parliament.

University took him to Bangor for zoology, then a Masters in biological photography at Nottingham. But lecture halls felt like cages. In 2014, aged 24, he packed a rucksack, bought a one-way ticket to Glasgow to Mallaig, and hitch-hiked the rest of the way to Ardnamurchan — the most westerly point of mainland Britain. He’s barely left since.

The Bothy That Changed Everything

Hamza’s home is a 200-year-old crofter’s cottage with no mains electricity, no central heating, or mobile signal. He cooks on a Rayburn stove, lights the place with candles, and keeps his BAFTA on a shelf next to jars of pickled beetroot. “I’m not being romantic,” he insists, poking the fire. “It’s just that when you live like this, the animals trust you. No Wi-Fi pings, no car engines. Just heartbeats.”

That trust is hard-won and astonishing to witness. Pine martens eat from his hand. A family of otters — the same lineage as the 2023 viral mum — use his garden as a nursery. Golden eagles circle so low he can hear their wings slice the air. Red deer stags spar on his lawn every autumn rut. He films it all on a battered Canon R5 he bought second-hand, editing on a solar-powered MacBook balanced on a crate of potatoes.

It was this raw, unfiltered access that caught the BBC’s eye. In 2021, a 30-second clip of Hamza bottle-feeding an orphaned otter pup went mega-viral. Within weeks he was offered Countryfile guest slots. Within months he was co-presenting Animal Park with Kate Humble. By 2023 he had his own prime-time series.

Strictly, Otters, and Overnight Icon Status

If one moment catapulted Hamza from beloved insider secret to household name, it was Strictly Come Dancing 2022. Booked almost as a novelty — “the wildlife guy who lives in a shed” — he arrived with zero dance training and the same way he approaches everything: fearless curiosity. Paired with Jowita Przystał, he transformed from stiff ranger to gliding showman, topping the leaderboard three times and reaching the final with a perfect-scoring Showdance to “Do You Love Me” that had Len Goodman weeping.

But it was the backstage footage that truly broke the internet: Hamza FaceTiming his otters from the Strictly dressing room, teaching them to wave at the camera; bringing a rescued hedgehog to rehearsals in his spangly shirt; crying uncontrollably when eliminated because “I wanted to make Sudan proud.” Overnight he became Britain’s unlikeliest heart-throb — 6ft 6in of gentle muscle, infectious grin, and an accent that flips between Glasgow burr and gentle Arabic lilt. Twitter declared him “the human equivalent of a warm hot-water bottle.”

Yet he never lost the plot. Prize money went straight to building a wildlife rehabilitation centre on his land. The glitterball trophy? It lives in the bothy loo “so everyone can feel like a winner.”

2025: The Year Nature TV Got Its Soul Back

This year Hamza has delivered three series that critics are already calling career-defining.

Wild Isles: The Hidden Highlands (BBC One, Spring 2025)* — a six-part love letter to Scotland’s secret wildlife, filmed over 700 days. Standout sequence: Hamza swimming with basking sharks off Coll while reciting Somali poetry underwater.
Britain’s Secret Seas (BBC Two, Autumn 2025) — diving with orca pods off Shetland, bioluminescent plankton blooms in Cornwall, and the first-ever footage of a humpback whale breaching inside the Thames estuary.
Snow Tracks (BBC One, Christmas Day 2025) — the show everyone is already calling “this generation’s The Snowman.” Over one magical winter, Hamza follows animal footprints through blizzards, culminating in a sequence where he lies flat in the snow as a wild lynx — reintroduced in secret — walks within inches of his face.

The lynx moment has already been viewed 42 million times on BBC iPlayer. “I could feel its breath,” he whispers in voice-over, tears freezing on his lashes. “And I realised: this is what trust feels like when it’s earned, not given.”

The Hamza Effect: Changing Britain One Child at a Time

Walk into any British primary school in 2025 and you’ll see the evidence of “The Hamza Effect.” Children who once screamed at spiders now rescue them in matchboxes. Classrooms have “otter corners” with webcams tuned to his live streams. Sales of binoculars for under-12s are up 400% year-on-year. The RSPB reports its youth membership has tripledoubled since 2022 — directly attributable to Hamza’s “Ranger for a Day” initiatives where kids join him tracking pine martens or ringing puffins.

He reads every letter. Every single one. In October 2025 a nine-year-old from Birmingham wrote: “Mr Hamza, my dad says Sudan is dangerous. But you left there and became kind. So maybe people can change the world by being kind first.” Hamza flew the boy and his father to Ardnamurchan for a weekend. They haven’t stopped smiling since.

Why Now? Why Him?

In an age of climate anxiety and doom-scrolling wildlife statistics, Hamza offers something radical: wonder without naïveté, joy without denial. He never shies from hard truths — episodes confront ocean plastic, raptor persecution, the climate refugee crisis — but he frames them through hope. “If a boy from the desert can fall in love with Scottish rain,” he says, “then anything is possible.”

His on-screen style is unlike anyone else: no shouting, no forced drama. Just a man, a camera, and the wild, speaking the same language. When a golden eagle chick fledges for the first time, he doesn’t narrate — he simply breathes “Alhamdulillah” and lets the silence do the work. When he finds a dead puffin tangled in fishing line, he weeps openly, then spends the night cutting ghost nets with local fishermen. Authenticity isn’t a brand for Hamza; it’s oxygen.

The Future: Bigger, Wilder, Closer

2026 is already mapped. A global series with National Geographic tracking the planet’s last 10 wild places. A children’s book deal — The Boy Who Talked to Otters — illustrated with his own photographs. And the project closest to his heart: opening the Ardnamurchan Wildlife Centre in 2027, a place where disadvantaged kids can stay for free, sleep under the stars, and remember they belong to something ancient and alive.

But for now he is still the man in the bothy, still rising at 3 a.m. because the otters are calling, still whispering back in a language older than words.

Britain has had many great naturalists. It has never had one quite like this: a black, Muslim, Scottish-Sudanese immigrant with size 14 feet and the gentlest soul you’ll ever meet, who taught an entire nation — one otter, one child, one perfect snowy silence at a time — how to fall in love with the world again.

The king is dead. Long live the king.

And somewhere out there tonight, under a waxing Highland moon, an otter is listening for his voice on the wind.