Hamsa Yassin: My dream is that kids could name five trees before they can name five Kardashians

The wildlife cameraman, Strictly champion and children’s TV presenter on the value of boredom, what lockdown revealed about our need for the outdoors, and how modern life is squeezing the curiosity out of children too early.

I keep joking that my plan is world domination. Not in a Bond villain way – in a love thy nature way. I want as many people as possible to fall in love with the natural world. If that takes books, documentaries, kids’ TV, school visits, or talks in village halls, then that’s what I’ll do. I’m going to spend my life preaching about nature with a cheeky smile on my face.

My new book is part of that. People have been telling me it feels like my documentaries on the page, which is the nicest feedback I could hope for. It’s a journey from Wiltshire all the way up to the Highlands where I live. I’ve been driving that route for years, up and down the country for filming, and to stop my brain going numb on the motorways I started clocking who lives along the way. Not the human neighbours – the other ones. Seals at Donna Nook. An old female golden eagle in mid-Wales. The grey seals pupping on the east coast. Every stretch of road now has wildlife stitched into it in my mind.

So the book isn’t just “here is a nice animal, here is a pretty view.” It’s: if you go on a journey through Britain, here’s what you could see if you knew where to look; here are the people who are caring without fanfare for those places; here is why it all matters.

Humans are not meant to spend 16 hours a day in temperature-controlled boxes. 

A lot of people ask if this work feels like an uphill battle. We have endless Twitter, Instagram, Netflix – all these ways to look away from what’s right outside the window. During lockdown, people had all the screens they could possibly want. They could binge every series, scroll for hours. Yet what did people crave? That one precious hour they were allowed outside. The park, the local wood, the scrappy bit of green by a canal. That was what kept people going. I wish we’d held onto that lesson.

Humans are not meant to spend 16 hours a day in temperature-controlled boxes. Sleep eight, commute one, sit in an office eight, 45 minutes walking the dog, then back to a screen – and we call that a life. If you did that to a cow – shut it in for that long – you’d immediately see disease. Farmers would say, “Open the gate, give them some space to range.” We won’t do it to our livestock, yet we design our own lives that way.

For me, every feeling sends me outdoors. Tired? Outside. Stressed? Outside. Happy? Outside. Nature is where my brain resets, and it did that for millions of people in those strange months. The natural world carried us through a crisis as a species, and as soon as the doors opened, we ran straight back into old habits.

A lot of what I care about comes back to children. If I were Prime Minister, I’d bring in a GCSE in natural history tomorrow. No one would fail. You’d probably just have to take part. I don’t want it to be a test that crushes people; I want it to be a doorway.

My dream is that kids could name five trees before they can name five Kardashians. Knowing every contour of a celebrity’s relationship history won’t help you much in life. Knowing that a copper beech does this, a horse chestnut does that; knowing what a nuthatch looks like, or how a badger moves – that gives you a sense of where you stand in the world.

Kids aren’t short of morality. Even when we take something adults fear, like a snake, children lean towards compassion. If you sit them down and say, “If we do this, the snake dies. If we do that, it doesn’t, and we’re safe. Which should we do?” they’ll choose what feels fair almost every time. “I’m scared of the snake, but I don’t want to kill it.” That’s such a pure instinct. The problem is when they never learn about the snake in the first place, or about the river it lives by, or the hedgerow that shelters it.

That’s where role models mattered to me. Sir David Attenborough and Steve Irwin lit that spark in a kid they’d never met. They reached straight into my living room and said, “Look at this. Isn’t it incredible?” That spark turned into a bonfire, and now I’m trying to pass it on, whether that’s through my CBeebies work as Ranger Hamza, visits to schools or writing children’s books. When a kid sticks up their hand and says, “Ranger Hamza, what’s the fastest bird?” or “How can a worm see under the ground?”, that’s one of my favourite sounds in the world. Raised hands mean curiosity. That’s everything.

You can’t just lecture kids, though. You have to tell them stories and let them ask questions. Show them a worm, stay quiet for a second, and the questions will come: where’s its head, which way is it going, how does it know where to go? You don’t shut that down with “right” or “wrong.” You say, “It could be. What do you think?” You keep the little fire going.

Farming sits right in the middle of all this. We’re brilliant, as a species, at pointing the finger: “You farmers are destroying the environment.” Then you ask, “Where does your food come from?” and suddenly it’s complicated. Farmers feed us. They are some of the biggest land stewards we have. If we want better, more nature-friendly food, we need to help them change – not just shout at them from the sidelines.

Take my friend Patrick, a farmer I write about in the book. His land is full of life – hares, siskins, blue tits, turtle doves, which are one of the rarest birds in the UK. They’re there because he leaves food on the ground and space in the hedges; because he doesn’t hammer every inch of his land with chemicals. He still earns a living. He still grows crops. It’s proof that “if you grow it, they will come.”

We already know nature can recover. Look at Chernobyl: within my lifetime, that landscape has begun to heal in incredible ways. If we can let one contaminated corner of the world recover, we can do it on purpose in the places we still live in. That’s where hope comes from for me. There’s plenty of doom and gloom around; people don’t need me to add another layer. What they need is proof that restoration is possible, that their choices matter.

If you live in a tower block, you’re probably closer to a peregrine than I am in the Highlands.

Something else people talk to me about is race and the countryside. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard, “The countryside is racist.” I can only speak from my experience, and I’m hardly a standard-issue figure: long hair, big lenses, slightly chaotic energy. I knock on a farmer’s door and say, “You’ve got beautiful land; do you mind if I put a hide in that corner?” and nine times out of ten they’ll say, “Aye, just watch the bull.”

To me, Mother Nature isn’t racist. The problems come from history, economics and who has inherited what, and where. Of course there are fewer Black faces in a British farming valley than in a London borough. Land, opportunity and cultural habits have been passed down in certain families for generations. But if you go to the global South, you’ll find Black farmers, Indian farmers, Chinese farmers working their land every day.

So one of my jobs is to show people who look and sound like me out in the field, on the coast, up a hill.

Representation matters, but so does honesty: there is wildlife in cities too. In fact, some of the richest places for certain species are right in the middle of urban centres. I went to Cardiff city centre to film one of our hardest-to-see birds; there are peregrine falcons nesting on high-rises in London; foxes are everywhere. If you live in a tower block, you’re probably closer to a peregrine than I am in the Highlands.

Access is a real issue – transport, money, safety – but exposure is another. You can’t love what you’ve never been shown. That’s why I always include cities in my documentaries, and why the book moves through service stations and suburbs as well as dramatic cliffs and remote glens. I want someone in a high-rise to see themselves in the story and think, “Hang on, we have that here.”

The day I stop learning about nature will be the day I’m ready to meet my maker.

I worry that we’re squeezing the curiosity out of children by over-scheduling their lives. Sir Ken Robinson talked about how schools were designed in the Victorian era to produce people who could read, write and count enough to work in factories. They were never really designed for wild, imaginative minds. A seven-year-old boy is meant to climb trees and sprint and fall in mud. A seven-year-old girl might want to dance and paint and invent strange games. Instead, we sit them at desks and then wonder why they fizz and wriggle and get labelled.

Boredom is underrated. When a child says, “Mum, I’m bored,” that’s a doorway. If no one rushes to fill it with a device, they might wander outside, make up a game, watch ants crossing a pavement, notice a bird on a roof. My mum had a brilliant trick that I only really understood later. When we were doing her head in, she wouldn’t shout, “Get out.” She’d just open the front door. Within minutes we’d drift outside, by choice. No forcing. Just invitation.

I think a lot about elders too – in nature and in human communities. In an elephant herd, the older bulls and matriarchs play a different role once they’re past breeding age. They enforce boundaries, pass on knowledge, show the younger ones how to behave. Human societies used to have versions of that in village elders or grandparents’ councils. In Sudan, where my family is from, if a couple has a problem, they go to the elders, who ask: what is best for this marriage, this community, this village? The decision is about the group, not just the individual.

In my own way, I’m trying to be that kind of elder-in-training for the natural world. I don’t claim to know everything; in fact, I say that the day I stop learning about nature will be the day I’m ready to meet my maker. I bring the experts into the frame – literally. If a scientist or ranger or farmer knows more than I do about adders or flies or bats, I want them in the programme, in the book, named and visible. I also put my crew in front of the camera. You’ll see Johnny in the hide, someone else on the drone. It’s never just me.

If children see a team of different people, from different backgrounds, working together outdoors, they might think, “That could be me. I could do that.” Families might see how we collaborate and start to see themselves as a little team too. Families become villages; villages become cities; cities become a country. That’s how change works – slowly and together.

In the end, I think the reason I love kids and animals so much is that they don’t lie to you. Mother Nature doesn’t lie either. A dog that isn’t well shows you in its body language long before a vet confirms it.

Humans, on the other hand, can look you in the eye and say they care, then act in the opposite way. Kids haven’t learned that yet. They’ll ask the blunt question – “Why are you in a wheelchair?” “Why is your hair so long?” – then accept the honest answer and get on with playing. They are the purest form of us. If I can reach them, light that spark, teach them five trees and five birds and the name of the bird they saw on the way to school, then maybe they will grow up wanting to protect what they love.

That’s my kind of world domination.

This conversation took place on 28 November and has been edited and condensed for clarity and flow.

Hamza's book, Homeward Bound - The Joy of Nature and My Life Outdoors, is available now. His first UK theatre tour, My Life Behind the Lens begins, begins in January 2026.