Tender is no ordinary sloth. He’s a young, sweet explorer living near a beach bar in Costa Rica’s South Caribbean. But his story starts with someone equally extraordinary: his mother, Tiki.

Sloths in the wild learn everything from their mother: where to sleep, what to eat, and even when it’s time to climb down the tree to defecate.

February, Sloth Love Month, is over, and it’s time to say goodbye to our adorable Kokomo, the Sloth of Love, but before the month ends, you still have one day to subscribe to our VIP community to receive the adoption pack of Suzi & Ginger for free!

Our team of researchers spent three days at La Selva Biological Station and Reserve at the end of August. There, they tried downloading the data from the GPS collar we fitted on Misty, George, and Selvina.

One would think that due to sloths’ famously slow lifestyle, observing them in the wild would not be a hard task. However, their slow lifestyle (a consequence of having the slowest metabolism of any land mammal) has resulted in the evolutionary aim of being nearly undetectable in the trees to avoid predation from Jaguars and Harpy Eagles.

In the South Caribbean of Costa Rica, it is pretty common to find sloths in unusual places: on a restaurant cutlery shelf, a hotel ladder, a fruit stand, clinging to a truck… you name it, sloths have been there. World-renowned wildlife photographer Suzi Eszterhas came to the South Caribbean to take eye-opening photographs of the lives of these sloths in urbanized areas.

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.

Baguette was the third three-fingered sloth collared for the Urban Sloth Project and was a rather spontaneous addition to the project. She was found while Suzi Eszterhas (World-renowned photographer and SloCo trustee) was visiting Puerto Viejo to document the plight of urban sloths.

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.