By all means go looking for something. Just don’t be surprised if you find something else. Sometimes instead of, sometimes as well as. It’s a truth that holds good for most of life, I suspect — and it’s unquestionably true of wildlife.

So we went looking for the birds of the bog. A rather wonderful raised-bog area lies a few miles from Takwela Camp on the banks of the Luangwa River in Zambia. It’s dramatically different to the riverbanks and the riverine forest we’d been exploring, and as a result, it’s full of find quite different birds.

This is quite good fun in list-building terms, but in terms of ecology and biodiversity and so forth it’s enthralling – and we found rufous-backed heron and black crake and, just as interesting but rather less exciting, moorhen, the same species as we have at home in the UK.

And that was all very fine and we all had a nice drink as the sun went down and then we drove off in the dark with the spotlight. And almost at once we found a leopard.

There was no clue from the impala a hundred yards away from where the leopard sat, comfortable in the fork of a sausage tree. That meant they were quite unaware of his presence, though he was aware of them all right: gazing with the fascination of someone watching an unusually good programme on the television.

He was a young male, recently parted from his mother and doing his best to cope with an independent life. He had no immediate plans to set up a territory for himself and with it, opportunities to mate. It was all he could do to keep going from one day to the next, even if he was occasionally troubled by lustful thoughts.

He came down from the tree in the manner of a piece of silk sliding off a high shelf – and then set off in the opposite direction to the impala. No doubt he had his reasons. We watched his retreat in the spotlight; he walked as if the light was coming from him rather than us. Then we drove on across the eternal African night.

• I was co-leading a trip with Wildlife Worldwide https://www.wildlifeworldwide.com/discover/zambia