The bateleur is one of the Luangwa constants: a marvellous bird you can expect to find most days. You almost always see them in flight, for they are committed gliders who can stay in the air all day with scarcely a flap, covering uncountable miles as they do so.

But there was one perched: an adult male, strongly black and white with a hooked beak that was a quite improbable shade of red. Bateleurs are raptors, flying on and on in search of prey with their wings in a shallow vee: a flight-profile that gives them immense control and stability in the rolling axis.

Bateleur is French for a circus performer, and they seem like tightrope walkers, strolling across a bottomless chasm with their arms flung wide, correcting minor wobbles with just the hint of a flourish. Their nonchalance in the air inspires a response of pure envy.

But the following day I was savouring at least something of the bateleur’s world, for we were flying north from Kayenda up to Tafika in a light aircraft: and that gave us a bateleur’s view of the Luangwa River that snaked its was beneath us. This river remains gloriously untamed, lashing its way across the valley from one side to the other like a wounded snake, as it has been doing for countless millennia, changing its course, making new lagoons, abandoning old haunts and pouring into new ones.

Down below I could see the hippos in the river, a scattered herd of grazing buffaloes, the dry water-courses that in a few months would become sparkling and full, the lion-coloured plains that would become lush and green, a grey line of elephants ready to ford the river. I flew above them all.

• I was co-leading the Ultimate Luangwa safari for wildlifeworldwide.com.