Trees, more trees. Ten, a hundred, a thousand, more?! The beginning of the Great Sloth Census (a different research project SloCo is conducting to study the population of sloths) is definitely not easy.

While strolling back from the beach one afternoon, I noticed a bunch of people standing by the side of the road, their necks craned upwards towards a tree that they were staring at intently. 

“July was my first serious month of volunteering, as I was still learning in June. I enjoyed feeling more confident in my sloth-tracking abilities and becoming more familiar with the area.

Hello! I’m Faith, a student from the UK, currently doing a 12-month research placement with the Sloth Conservation Foundation working towards my degree in Zoology. Believe it or not I came across SloCo while online shopping. I was looking at a sustainable clothing brand that donates to several wildlife charities to aid conservation efforts, one of them being SloCo.

I have been working as a researcher for SloCo for only 7 months. The time has passed extremely fast, and still, I have learned incredible things that can only be taught in the field, working with people face to face and always improving my skills, not only my knowledge as a scientist but improving my second language which is English (people say I can speak good but I know I can get better at it).

“Ow! Ow, ow ow owwwwch!” I crouch down and hold my head in my hands, my skull still ringing with the impact. I feel as though I’ve been clonked with a falling coconut, or perhaps a rogue meteorite, though on some level I know that if this were the case I’d be far less conscious right now.

The sea breeze is a welcome relief as we crest the final switchback and come out on top of the cliff. I take off my hat and let the wind run through my hair. It’s too hot to dry us out much, but the view from up here is my favorite in all of Puerto Viejo: the seething white and blue waves beneath us, the mist-shrouded distant horizon, and the sunlit local Cocles Island.

“Oh look, barbed wire,” Becky says as she picks her way around the rusty tangle in front of her. “It’s my favorite.” “Are you sure?” I ask. “We have a busted sewer pipe over here.” “That’s my special favorite,” Becky assures me.

I stare at the spider hanging in front of my face. It is huge, blue and black and yellow, hanging from a golden web longer than my bicycle and better constructed than my house. It stares back at me.

I’m standing amongst the wreckage of felled trees and bulldozed undergrowth, my boots crunching on dead vegetation, but I’m not looking down.

I stare at the low chair in my living room, which I would swear on anything you like contained an orange backpack full of specialized sloth tracking equipment the last time I saw it. It is now empty.

“Dear Santa, This year I have been extremely very mostly good, and for Christmas, I would really like for a sloth to go poop.”

“Oh great,” says Dr. Cliffe. “I have poop in my boot.”

“Don’t you mean ON your boot?” says Amelia, using a machete to get through a two-meter-long spider web.

“Nope,” says Dr. Cliffe. “It’s dribbled down. And it belongs to someone else.”

Boys and girls of every age, Wouldn’t you like to see something strange? Come with us and you will see, Some weird things out while sloth tracking!

“I don’t even know what’s real anymore!” Amanda wails. We are tracking a sloth named Alan through the Cacao Forest, which I am thinking of renaming the Fairy Forest, because the lack of visibility and the way the radio signals bounce around is truly otherworldly. Also, the Bermuda Triangle is already taken.

They say that looking at trees can improve your mood. Merely being in the presence of these grand monuments of nature is credited with boosting the immune system, lowering blood pressure, lowering stress, accelerating recovery from injury, even increasing altruistic tendencies and curing ADHD.

I cling to a chain-link fence, the strap of the radio receiver clenched between my teeth as I climb sideways over an open ditch. It is clear from the smell that the local neighborhood has not gotten on board with the whole septic system plan.

“Oh my gosh,” says my boss, holding the binoculars to her face. “I think Croissant is a boy.” I take my eyes off the beeping box attached to our portable radio antenna and peer into the trees, trying to find the small, tan-colored sloth amongst the palm fronts and tree bark. Boy or girl, I personally think Croissant might actually be a coconut, but I defer to Amelia’s experience.