You may kiss the shell...

Here are a couple of watercolor and pen-and-ink sketches of the head of a juvenile box turtle, done on the Ecus paper I mentioned in an earlier post. The original images are both very small, which is why you can see the grain of the paper. They are about life-size or slightly larger (the originals relative to the turtle that served as model, that is). I did these a couple of years ago.

Box turtles are an animal with a most unusual type of charisma. I was reading the paper today and came across an article that mentioned something called The Box Turtle Bulletin, in a context that seemed to have nothing at all to do with our chelonian friends. It turns out that a speechwriter for some senator included a line about how gay marriage would lead to some sort of slippery slope (it would have to be pretty darned slippery) resulting in people marrying box turtles, and this line made it into a national newspaper. I'm not sure what led this speechwriter to look beyond the barnyard and into the woods and prairies. Maybe he or she was tired of the same old livestock all the time. Archie Carr once said "Everybody loves box turtles", but I don't think that's what he had in mind. Anyway, the publisher of The Box Turtle Bulletin was evidently taken with the remark and saw some useful metaphor in it. I like to collect quotes about turtles in general and box turtles in particular and I have to say that this was a new on on me.