New park record: 13 Sloths!!
Trip Start
Oct 04, 2009
1
33
65
Trip End
Nov 20, 2010
Panama City, Panama
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Probably my favorite day in Panama City was spent painfully craning our necks trying to befriend sloths and iguanas around a forested area protected by the Smithsonian. Entrance tickets only cost $2, so we had low expectations, but I should know not to underestimate the energizing and euphoric effects that animals have on me. I become giddy and embarrassing - trying to communicate with the animals in whichever form seems most promising.
When we arrived, I really had to pee. By the time I came back from the bathroom, Andy had accidentally found a sloth while zooming Pelicans with the camera to compensate for his poor vision (confusing, I know.) I was not completely convinced it was a sloth or even alive. It looked more like a hairy, matted nest than an animal of any sort. You could see that it did have toes when we used the camera zoom so we finally announced it official: our first sloth!!!
It didn't help that we could not identify which end of the nest was the head. Regardless, I planted a big kiss on Andy and started bragging to anyone nearby that my boyfriend found an elusive sloth. We weren't even sure we were going to see one at all so we were extremely excited and taking loads of awful photos since you could barely see the thing. We must have been making a scene since an attentive employee wandered over and confirmed it was a baby sloth and even HARDER to find. Andy was beaming with pride as if he had just discovered a new species. We could not understand why other visitors weren’t reacting the same way we were. We were so lucky to find a sloth!! They would squint at it in the tree and then nod in agreement then silently back away. As the day unfolded, we realized that there wasn't much luck involved as there was another sloths in plain view about 50 yards up the path, but ignorant to this, we made our first sloth sighting memorable and well-documented. Andy also was finally able to stop bringing up how I wouldn’t overpay for a guided night hike in Costa Rica where he was supposedly destined to meet his first sloth.
Sloths are quite the unconventional climbers and go nowhere fast, which would make you think they were easy to photograph, but they were far from cooperative. They didn’t seem to mind how close we could get when they climbed on low vines, but they would not look at me, climb in good lighting or in a predictable direction. They become more active closer to dusk so after seeing a handful of extremely visible sleeping sloths, we entertained ourselves with the turtles and starfish and iguanas. The turtle employee was friendly and chatty (She ultimately gave us a ride home!) and told us she had once seen up to 12 sloths in one day on the premises and other days she would see none. Obviously, this became our new mission: we MUST find all 12 sloths and try to set a new unofficial park record. We take missions like this very seriously.
It was much easier to spot the sloths once they were on the move and we couldn’t believe our luck, having extremely active sloths ALL OVER THE PLACE. We started just yelling out the numbers as Andy ran ahead of me counting loudly and I tried to keep up while photographing every single one as if they were not all identical to one another. Of course, we captured some sloth action for you on video, but keep in mind, when I say extremely active sloths, that doesn’t necessarily mean they had to do anything but move. We had to delete quite a few videos just because they were so boring. The sloth appeared to be on the verge of doing some super impressive maneuver like scratching his head (eee!!) or yawning (wow!) and then got camera shy and decided to sit completely still and just have their long, pale hair flap in the wind. From far away, the sloths seemed quite cuddly and gentle – maybe because their slow, drunken struggle. I think once you get a good view of their claws/toes you will quickly disagree. It was probably best the park closed at 7PM because I couldn’t bring myself to leave even after we found 13 (!!!!!!!!) and were convinced we could find more, but my neck was absolutely killing me from staring straight up into the trees waiting for the sleepy sloths to do something extraordinary. If they did, I missed it, but we had a good time narrating the sloths lazy attempts at mobility. What bizarre creatures. Do check out the videos that made the cut :)
