Nothing like a bit of forest, if you happen to like life. There is more life in these forests, and in more different forms, than anywhere else on earth. All forest is fabulous. But I have a special thing about the Rio Bravo Conservation and Management Area, because I bought it.

I have saved this piece of forest in Belize. In a world full of troubles, where destruction rules and rainforests are always the first places to get demolished, it is wonderful to know that this hefty little bit of forest is all right: and that it’s all right because it’s mine.

I went there to visit it: to gloat, if you like, over the beauty of my work. It was a wonderful trip: well it could hardly be anything else. It was worth it just to view the absurd keel-billed toucans looking shiftily around camp: birds with an enormous beak of green picked out with red, blue and salmon pink.

Though for my money some of the best of the birds were to be seen, when the day’s birding was done: sitting around camp with a beer in the last light of the day while the humming birds whizzed around us and between us and before us: wedge-tailed sabre-wing, white-bellied emerald and the rest. I never really got the hang of breaking them down into species to tell the truth: I was always mesmerised by their fizzing, whirring, slurping existence. My humming-birds: I gave them that existence, or at least, I am part of it.

I thought it was my roommate snoring, but I soon grew accustomed to it: one of the processes of visiting a new place is to acquire new eyes and new ears. Soon my new ears were telling me that this was howler monkey, monkeys that sing like birds, if less beautifully, to claim and maintain territories. There were spider monkeys out there too, using the tail as a fifth limb, and they really do look like giant arachnids. Some place, then. And all because of me.

Well, not entirely me. The place is owned and managed by a Belizean organisation called, not inappropriately, Programme for Belize. Much of the funds were supplied by a British-based organisation called the World Land Trust, which continues to back Programme for Belize with funds and management advice.

John Burton founded the World Land Trust, and it was he that I believed was snoring too incontinently. WLT has raised the money, much of it by people thrilled to contribute a small sum to purchase an acre of rainforest. The current price for an acre is fifty quid, which makes it as fine an investment as you could wish to make. And I have been part of that process: and it has been a privilege to do so.

WLT have also financed purchases in Brazil, Paraguay, Argentina India, the Philippines, with 350,000 acres saved so far. It is a special joy, then, to visit a project that you know is being done right: that you know is one hundred per cent benign, a place that you are not exploiting but supporting.

And there is a fizz, a prickle, a magic quality about the place: about the closed green canopy that holds all manner of unseen mysteries. In forest, it is hard to see things: what you get instead is the extraordinary feeling of life happening all around you, in an impossible number of different ways. It’s being there that’s the privilege: not ticking off stuff from a list.

But all the same… all the same… the jeep swung round a corner and we hit the brakes and we were struck dumb with amazement and then, when all was done, we found ourselves whooping and giggling like schoolgirls because we had just been privileged to see one of the most beautiful creatures on the planet: and one you are simply not supposed to see.

I was conscious of the deep colour, the rich markings, the power of the thing, a neck on him like Mike Tyson: and above all, of an aloof, self-contained, masterful presence. Jaguar! Bloody jaguar: perhaps the most outrageous piece of luck I’ve had in a lifetime of staring out at the wild. And not just any jaguar either: my jaguar. Yours too, if you wish.