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 some crackers.

Some people who visit the Luangwa Valley in Zambia want only to look at and photograph large mammals, especially predators. Fair enough: and our trip brought marvellous encounters with lions, leopards and wild dogs. But if you’re not taking in the birds as well, you’re missing out – and there were some belters.

It’s harder still to get people excited about butterflies. It’s understandable: stare at an insect and you might miss an eagle or an elephant. But we were there when the season of the rains was getting into its stride, there were flowers everywhere, and their pollinators were out in numbers.

Constantly in the tail of my eye I was seeing a butterfly of startling orange. The guides here in the Valley are the best in the world, but there is little client-demand for expertise on butterflies. I had to do a lot of it on my own.

The African monarch was one of those orange butterflies, but it wasn’t the one I saw most. What was it? At last one kept still in front of me for a decent length of time — we had stopped and most of us were looking at something else  — and there it basked, soaking up the rays of the sun. I had it in pin-sharp focus in the bins and was able to observe the exquisite calligraphy of the black marks across the blazing upper surface of the wings.

This, I found, with my butterfly book (40 years old) was a common leopard. A name is the beginning of intimacy: should I be lucky enough to go back to the Valley in butterfly time, I will know this leopard again. I knew a tiny bit more about the Valley than I had done when we left the lodge.

• I was travelling with Wildlife Worldwide. More trips https://wildlifeworldwide.cmail20.com/t/y-e-xididdd-thukydkiuh-r/