The End of a Perfect Day

Wikipedia Commons, User Pmaas

Finding those Great Auks on the way back from Ireland in 1858 was a real stroke of luck, I must say.

In those days the bird was already believed extinct, so who would have believed that we would find a nesting pair on a Hebridean islet like that, on our tour back home to Wessex?

And when we got them really home back to Husborne Crawley in the 21st Century - what a find! What a boon for naturalists and the natural world.  Yet it's so natural, the way we brought them back to a village on the Woburn estate like that. Although, in a funny kind of way, they were a temporal anomaly - a breeding pair of extinct birds, three halves of a century after their breed died out.

So it was appropriate that we washed them down with that rather nice Tillich '64. Dry, and yet so full of depth, the perfect accompaniment. We'll never see their like again. What a meal.