Tales from the Jungle | November 2025
Welcome to the final stretch of 2025! Before we wrap up the year and share our full list of achievements, here’s everything that happened over the past month, and it’s a lot!
Giving Tuesday for HQ
Giving Tuesday is just around the corner, and this year we’re fundraising for something special: our new Headquarters!
We’ve officially reached the stage of reviewing stunning 3D architectural renderings, so here’s a little glimpse of the plan.
Thanks to the generosity of some of our most loyal supporters, we have secured 80% of the funds needed to build our first-ever permanent headquarters in Costa Rica - complete with a forest nursery, sloth research lab, and education center. Now, we are just $30,000 away from completing it! Help us build our permanent home!
Team Sloth Returns to La Selva
This month we visited La Selva Biological Station & Reserve once again to reconnect with our colleagues from Brown University. Together, we recently published a paper on parasites, and our joint genetics research continues to progress, with exciting conservation implications on the horizon.
Protocols at TRR
We also met with the veterinary team from Toucan Rescue Ranch to develop protocols for blood-sample collection for genetic analysis, as well as tissue sampling from deceased sloths. These collaborations are essential for improving our understanding of sloth population health and long-term viability.
Grants: The Bad and the Good
This month brought a wave of emotions surrounding grants!
We learned that our application for the €30,000 EOCA grant wasn’t selected. We poured weeks of effort into writing, refining, and pouring our hearts into the proposal. It was a tough blow, but your overwhelming support during the public voting stage meant the world to us. Thank you for showing up for us as always.
And here’s the bright side:
We won a $20,000 Conservation Connect Grant for our Connected Gardens Project in the Indigenous territory of Kéköldi!
This project is built around three key components, each designed together with Kéköldi leaders to support cultural resilience and ecological restoration:
1. Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) Workshops
We will host workshops with Indigenous youth to help reconnect younger generations with traditional ecological knowledge, a need identified repeatedly by community leaders concerned about its loss.
2. Community-Led Reforestation
We will plant 1,800 trees in priority deforested areas inside the Kéköldi territory and distribute 1,000 culturally important, medicinal, and food-producing trees to 100 families.
3. Indigenous Cultural Sloth Ecotours
We will develop an Indigenous-led Cultural Sloth Tour, employing local guides and families. This creates sustainable income to support continued restoration long after the grant period ends.
Your support made this possible so thank you for helping us grow work that is rooted in the community and built for long-term impact.
ASOGUAVO Visit & Connected Gardens
As part of the Connected Gardens initiative, our team visited local partners at ASOGUABO (Asociación Guardianes del Bosque) for a day of environmental education with children at Rio Negro Elementary School.
This month the team planted 105 trees, installed three new canopy bridges, and carried out maintenance on four existing ones. We’ve slowed down new bridge installations for now … and you’ll see why in the ´What Went Wrong´ section below.
The LEGAL Sloth Trade
This week the CITES Conference of the Parties (COP20) takes place in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. CITES - the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species - regulates the global trade of wildlife.
Shockingly, some sloth species are still being legally exported from the wild. Watch the video below to learn more about this problem!
What Went Wrong
Even the best field plans go sideways sometimes!
During a recent donor visit, José was tracking Ponder in the primary forest when a small hop from a rock to the road snapped the antenna cable mid-tour. Without it, we couldn’t track Ponder that day. By the time we returned (on a non-tracking day, naturally!) the signal had vanished, and we had to rely on GPS data instead.
On another day, Tender, normally a very predictable sloth, wandered into a neighboring forested property. While following him, José accidentally disturbed a bee nest and got stung. Thankfully, he’s not allergic!
Fieldwork keeps us humble.
Our lead climber Dayber sustained an injury this month. He’s recovering well, but until he’s back to full strength, we’ve adjusted our canopy-bridge installation schedule. The team has reshuffled roles to keep work moving, a reminder that conservation demands flexibility every day.
Thousands of reasons to be thankful
Thank you to the thousands of you who follow us on social media, read our emails, and spread awareness about sloths, their conservation problems and the reasons we celebrate them.
And thank you to the thousands of you who have donated, adopted a sloth, become a VIP or donated for a canopy bridge.
Thank you everyone for trusting in us and in our work to protect sloths. We are grateful for you all and we are determined to show our gratitude by working harder than ever to honour your support.
We wish you a wonderful December and start of the Holiday season!
All the best from the jungle,
