Sloth and other animals in Costa Rica

 Whilst in Costa Rica in Jan 2022, I was really excited to see my first sloths in the wild. I had seen some a couple of years earlier in the Amazon, Brazil, in Jan 2020, but those were captive ones. See my blog on Boca de Valeria, Amazon.

So it felt more special to see my first wild ones. We were on the east coast side of Costa Rica, i.e. the Caribbean. We started our boat ride on the Tortuguero Canal, and went up the Rio Moin which leads to the Rio Bartolo. The Tortuguero Canal is a National Park and conservation area. The sloths here are the three-toed sloths, which are arboreal neotropical mammals. They are Bradypus variegatus. Sloths are the world's slowest moving mammal.

The first sloth was quite well hidden in a tree and it was difficult to get good photos. With the brown fur that is tinged green, it was well camouflaged. Sloths fur is generally tinged green which is due to algae.

That was the best shot I could get so I was really pleased later on when we saw our second sloth and got a really good view. It was on a branch by the water and climbed down until its backside was touching the water then sat there for a while, before climbing back up. Sloths are very good swimmers but are incredibly slow in trees.

Here is it starting its descent to the water.

Here you can see the 3 digits on the upper arm, although one is almost invisible in the sunlight -

It eventually makes it down to the water level and sits there contemplating what to do. Its head is looking directly into the water -

Someone then spotted a cayman (caiman) so we moved off to see that -

When we got back to the sloth, it had climbed back up the tree -

The facial structure of a sloth gives the appearance that it is constantly smiling 

Video of the sloth in action -

Costa Rica has 4 species of monkey. We saw one, having a snooze high in a tree. It is a mantled howler (Alouatta palliata). It is is one of the largest Central American monkeys and spends the majority of each day resting and sleeping. Leaves make up a lot of its diet.

We saw lots of birds along the river. Yellow-crowned night heron, vultures

Various iguanas -

There is a Costa Rica sloth sanctuary nearby, so my sighting of wild sloths felt more exciting knowing again that these were wild creatures rather than in any form of captivity.