Against a backdrop of pictures of colorful fish, leathery sea turtles and endangered Hawaiian monk seals, President Clinton today created the largest United States nature preserve, 84 million acres underwater around the northwestern Hawaiian Islands, to help save the area's coral reefs and other wildlife.
Turtle eggshells can be leathery, as in sea turtles, or brittle, as in many tortoises.
Head, limbs and tail withdraw into the leathery shell of the turtle.
Yet some of the best poems here have the slenderest link to literal love, like the spooky and evocative "New Potato": This is just one of the leathery eggs the scuffed-up, dirty turtle of the moon buried early in spring, her eyes like stars fixed on the future, and, inside its red skin, whiteness, like all of the moons to come, and marvelous, buttered with light.
And its lack of an ordinary turtle-style shell (instead it has a leathery, flexible carapace not attached to its ribs and spinal column) probably represents another adaptation to deep water, where pressures would crack a rigid shell.
It investigated a wide range of wildlife, from fish, marine turtles and sea cucumbers – a worm-like animal with leathery skin – to sea plants such as mangroves and sea grasses.
I come from a long and leathery line of ornery, horn-handed men who burned their lonesome days wrestling with snapping turtles, squinting at pickerel, junking cars and picking the dump.
Across the northeastern coast of the Gulf of Mexico, female sea turtles began plodding out of the water and up the beach, each burying a clutch of a hundred or more leathery eggs beneath the sand.
What a perfect, leathery landscape.
