A night walk is not a stroll with good luck. You pick the stream, you walk slowly, and you look where nobody looks: the underside of a leaf, the crack in a fallen trunk, the water's edge.
A headlamp keeps your hands free, and you need your hands — for the camera, for the notebook, and to hold an animal for the minimum time needed and return it exactly where it was.
What surprises first-timers most is not what they see. It is what they hear: a forest at night is not silent, it is full of calls that do not exist by day.