He Grew a Wildlife YouTube Channel to 80K Subs While Working Full-Time
YouTube Creators Hub
Dusty Porter
4.7 • 551 Ratings
🗓️ 13 February 2026
⏱️ 32 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Ben Zino started filming wildlife in his backyard at 15 years old — no car, no fancy gear, just a passion for conservation. Nearly a decade later, his channel The Wild Report has grown to 80,000 subscribers and 300 videos, all while working a full-time job. Whether you're a wildlife creator or not, Ben's approach to storytelling, packaging, and staying passionate will resonate with any creator building on the side.
About Ben:
Ben Zino is a conservation biologist and environmental educator with a passion for getting people excited about the amazing wildlife that we share this planet with! His content brand, The Wild Report, focuses on inspiring viewers to get outside and engage with local green spaces and conservation efforts.
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Timestamps:
0:00 — The unpredictability of filming wildlife 0:30 — Intro: Meet Ben Zino from The Wild Report 2:00 — How The Wild Report started at age 15 4:00 — How the channel has evolved over a decade 6:30 — Planning trips & being sought out by researchers 8:00 — How YouTube has changed in the wildlife space 11:00 — On-location filming tips: always get more B-roll 13:00 — Time management as a part-time creator 15:30 — Improving storytelling: the thesis statement method 17:30 — Example: copperhead snake thesis statement 18:30 — Evolving on-camera presence: teacher vs. fact presenter 20:00 — Ben's minimal filming kit & tools 22:00 — Authenticity & transparency on YouTube in 2026 22:45 — Monetization: seasonal income & creative freedom 25:30 — What Ben wishes he learned sooner 27:00 — The importance of packaging & ethical thumbnails 29:30 — Final advice: keep your content ecosystem vibrant
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | if you can film other things that you weren't expecting to tell a story about, but you think you |
| 0:04.4 | can tie them to the story, you've got to get those things on camera, too. And I think wildlife is, |
| 0:09.8 | it's unique also because I don't know what I'm going to find. I could spend 10 hours researching |
| 0:15.4 | and writing a script, the best story ever about some creature and spend 10 days looking for it and I just might not find it. |
| 0:21.8 | Hello and welcome to the YouTube Creators Hub podcast. My name is Dusty Porter and every Friday |
| 0:26.6 | I sit down with a content creator and talk with them about what's working on their channel |
| 0:31.7 | and their journey as a content creator. So let's go ahead and jump into this week's conversation. |
| 0:37.2 | Hello everyone. Welcome to |
| 0:39.0 | the conversation portion of the show. I am super excited to be joined today by Ben Zino. He is a conservation |
| 0:47.2 | biologist and environmental educator with a passion for getting people excited about the amazing |
| 0:53.1 | wildlife that we share this planet with. |
| 0:55.7 | His content brand, The Wild Report, which is the YouTube channel that I'll be referencing today, |
| 1:00.9 | focuses on inspiring viewers to get outside and engage with local green spaces and conservation efforts. |
| 1:07.9 | As of right now, his YouTube channel, as I mentioned, is called The Wild Report, has right under 80,000 subscribers, right at 300 videos uploaded, and he's got a really great community that he's built over there. Ben, how are you doing today? |
| 1:22.6 | I'm good, Dusty. Excited to be here. Absolutely. I'm excited to have you. Now, I'll be honest, I've had all sorts of creators on this podcast, and I've had some folks who are into animals, maybe a specific type of animal or a zookeeper, I think, a few years back. |
| 1:37.0 | But I've never had anyone in your exact space. |
| 1:40.5 | I think it's so cool what you're doing. |
| 1:42.5 | So I'm going to kind of give you the floor and let |
| 1:44.7 | you explain to the audience the origin story of your channel. So how did the wild report come to be? |
| 1:51.7 | Yeah, good question. I think as a child, it started really, really just really being interested in |
| 1:58.1 | wildlife and finding animals fascinating. I blame my mom for reading me dinosaur books all the time as a small child. |
| 2:04.2 | That is her fault. |
... |
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