No cats or predators in Kanha today but a very nice pair of Oriental Honey Buzzards which aren’t actually Buzzards at all but relatives of the kites. Both the Oriental and its European relative (which is a very rare bird indeed in the UK being just at the westernmost edge of their range),look like more aggressive and heavily armoured birds (Hawk Eagles in Asia and the Common Buzzard in Europe) and there is a reason for that; protective camouflage. They both have plumage that is designed to fool raptors such as the Goshawk that will think twice about attacking the larger more aggressive birds. One of my favourite books as a child was T.H.White’s The Once and Future King which is a strange and wonderful tome whose magical depths are barely hinted at in the Disney cartoon (surprise), but White was also a brilliant nature writer and his book The Goshawk, is a haunting account of his own obsession with hawking in a cottage on the Stowe school estate in the 1930′s. White was a romantic manque born out of his time who despaired of humanity- it’s easy to imagine him as a colonial administrator (like his father) in some remote part of the empire finding a sort of peace in the natural world around him. His attempt to train a goshawk in rural Buckinghamshire amounts to an extraordinary heroic rejection of the modern world and one that prefigures his return to the ‘matter of Britain’ in The Once and Future King which he began the following year. The best of White’s work and there is a great deal of it in the four volumes of the Once and Future King, is charged with a wonder for wild nature that ‘sings a pagan creed outworn’, as Wordsworth put it. Indeed for White the world (by which we must read the human world) was always too much with him. This was not a fashionable view at the time, one can only think of his contemporary, the American poet Robinson Jeffers whose lines about a wounded raptor in Hurt Hawks (‘I’d sooner except the penalties kill a man than a hawk’, express a reverence for wild creatures that is easily misread as misanthropic. White is often cited as an inspiration for Harry Potter, which does him a great disservice as I find the latter sentimental,  snobbish and shoddily written in the extreme. I’d agree with Anthony Holden’s inspired put down of the Potter novels as ‘Billy Bunter with broomsticks’  ( his review is here http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2000/jun/25/booksforchildrenandteenagers.guardianchildrensfictionprize2000)  and add my own less-inspired ‘cosy supernatural’ before directing you or the sensitive imaginative child that you are, were, or aspire to be to the The Sword in the Stone.