I’m inclined to get a bit soppy on the last morning. In a few hours I would be leaving the Luangwa Valley in Zambia and heading home. An elegiac mood descended: I started waving to impalas and smiling mistily at lilac-breasted rollers. A black cuckoo was calling A hippo waded heavily across Mfuwe Lagoon, followed… [Read More]

We were supposed to be up and rolling by 5.30 but not today. Our vehicles should have been setting off into the wonders of South Luangwa National Park in Zambia but there they were, still parked up, still all together and still empty. The reason for the hold-up was obvious enough: about 12 feet high… [Read More]

I wonder if a leopard ever gets fed up with being the terror of the bush. We were drawn towards them by the sound of alarming impalas: a curious sort of barking snort. And there they were, two of them, a mother and a cub of ten months in full daylight. Which is not their… [Read More]

A couple of months earlier I was in the northern part of the Luangwa Valley in Zambia. It’s a place where the elephants aren’t sure about you. Approach them in a vehicle and they are uneasy, trying to work out the best plan: run away or charge. A little headshaking, a little light trumpeting, a… [Read More]

We stopped to take morning tea in a pleasant spot beneath a winterthorn and as I sipped good hot rooibos I heard the sweet song of willow warbler. I had last heard this song at my place in Norfolk in early June: now I was hearing it in late November in the Luangwa Valley in… [Read More]

The man in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner walked on and turned no more his head/ Because he knows a fearful fiend doth close behind him tread. It’s said that Shelley fainted clean away on reading those lines. But the pukus of the Luangwa Valley in Zambia are made of sterner stuff. Pukus are… [Read More]

I had been in the Luangwa Valley just before the end of the dry season. A couple of months later I was back, just as the wet season was finding its stride – and it was a valley transformed. The earth and the grass were no longer lion-coloured: everything was green. Some places – green… [Read More]

Well, look, I mean to say, any way you enjoy your wildlife without killing it is fine by me – but all the same it’s a bit like walking round the National Gallery refusing to look at any painting less than ten foot square. Sure, it’s a perfectly legitimate approach, but you’re going to miss… [Read More]

I’d been looking for the damn bird for more than 30 years and was increasingly inclined to doubt its existence. But what the hell: let’s have another dart for the African pitta. It looks like a badly drawn blackbird coloured in by a child with a brand new box of felt-tips. Apparently. It hides in… [Read More]

Lions do rather get in the way. There we were, off to do some serious birding in the Luangwa Valley in Zambia when a colleague told us via radio that there were lions about. The first that had been seen for more than a week. It was one of those little tests that the Valley… [Read More]

Sometimes you travel for thousands of miles over the course of many days, all for the sake of two seconds. For those two seconds you have invested all those hours and all those miles — and you account it a bargain. Best deal of your life. Knowing those two seconds will stay with you forever…. [Read More]