If there’s one thing fieldwork teaches you, it’s that nothing ever goes entirely to plan, and that’s exactly what makes it exciting.

José Pablo Guzmán García is our sloth scientist in charge of the Urban Sloth Project (USP)and is also involved in other research initiatives, such as the Great Sloth Census.

Last week, we went to the primary forests in search of new sloths to collar and monitor for the Urban Sloth Project.

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.

We do a lot of work to help wild sloths, and it’s great when we receive, for example, reports of them using our canopy bridges; but besides the photo or the video, we don’t know anything else about those sloths. So it’s very interesting when we have the opportunity to closely study and follow a particular sloth because we can learn so much from them. Today we want to share with you the story of a very special sloth named Angel.

Studying the GPS locations of an animal that doesn’t move much is challenging compared to studying species that travel a lot, such as whales and cheetahs. When studying sloths, accuracy is what we need to focus on.

This lovely pair was discovered in the beautiful garden of a local resort.   The owner contacted Dr. Cliffe, founder and executive director of The Sloth Conservation Foundation.

Many locals in the beach town of Puerto Viejo de Talamanca, where the Sloth Conservation Foundation is located, help Dr. Rebecca Cliffe and her team by alerting her when they find a sloth.

As we welcomed 2024, the holiday season brought well-deserved breaks for part of our team. So, in true sloth style, we’ve started the year slowly but steadily. Let’s dive into the highlights of the first 31 days of this exciting new year!

What a year, huh?! Everything happened in 2023 for the Urban Sloth Project (USP)! We upgraded our technology by saying goodbye to our sloth backpacks and embracing collars with Daily Diaries Data Loggers and GPS trackers.

Habitat surveys are an essential part of the Urban Sloth Project (USP). In these surveys, we make eight squares, each 100 square meters, in the areas where sloths live. We collect GPS locations of the sloths and study the trees in these squares.

We are entering the next phase of the Urban Sloth Project! The aim of the Urban Sloth Project (USP) is to understand how urbanization and habitat disturbance are affecting the lives of sloths and their ecology.

Luna made an unexpected entrance into the Urban Sloth Project (USP) in March 2021, accompanied by her first baby, Sol.

The SloCo team visited  La Selva Biological Station and Reserve to place GPS collars on the sloths that live there.

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.

We will never forget that stormy day in May 2021 when we found Mango on the ground outside of HQ, tiny and wet, and clearly out of her depth. Jim, our plushie sloth mascot, came to the rescue as Mango’s surrogate mother. Mango clung to Jim and almost immediately fell asleep.

April was a busy month in the South Caribbean of Costa Rica; we have updates about Luna, an exciting new auction, bridges, camera trap footage, and more!

At the end of last year, our tight-knit SloCo team scattered far and wide to celebrate the holidays with their families and friends. Some went to the other side of Costa Rica, some as far as countries such as Argentina, the UK, Germany, or the US.

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).

The Urban Sloth Project is a research aiming to study how habitat disturbance in urbanized areas of the South Caribbean of Costa Rica is affecting the behavior and ecology of wild sloths. The project is entering its 4th year, and surely, monitoring sloths is never a boring task.