On the last day of October, an effervescence of dragonflies fizzed the shade and skies around camp; an immaculate incandescence, prompting a frenzy of hyperphagy – the glut of softly whirring insects easy prey for hawking kingfisher, bee-eater and roller.

The plaintive keening cry sears the soul – it’s a call to, and a celebration of, the wild and wildness. It’s October 24th, the 55th anniversary of Zambian Independence, and since we are in the bush a day to celebrate our national bird, the ubiquitous fish eagle.

You can’t go anywhere, can’t hurry past. You have to wait. Listen to the low grumbles and gurgles of the ever operational digestive system, the sigh of success as the stretched trunk delicately, elegantly, detaches leaves or a particular pod

Today its buffalo versus elephant: an unfamiliar elephant bull, no doubt just passing through camp, has spent a quiet few hours shaking the Winterthorn of their fruit, gently scooping the gnarled and twisted pods – orange, red, purple and brown, into the every grinding millstone jaw.

Up in the canopy of the acacia, shrouded and spotted by the fallacious shade of arborial twilight, was the female leopard.

I imagine being in the middle of a pod of hippos to be much like an eternal trip to the traffic department, or some other bureaucratic operation of chaotic organization, in the height of a summer afternoon.

In September the first the swallows hatched. Finally Summer, as the ancient Wessex song goes, is icumen in. The wire-tailed couple have been building their nest and settling the eggs for the past month and a half, eagerly watched by my binoculars, and much to the general bemusement of guests collected around the cake at tea-time.