Celebrating the installation of the Sloth Crossing canopy bridge number 300!
Everything Has a Beginning
When we started the Sloth Crossing Project in 2019, we never imagined that this initiative would become this big. Even 100 bridges seemed like a challenging milestone to achieve at the time.
We were a team of just four people, and Connected Gardens and the Sloth Crossing Project were managed by only one person, Patricio. We weren’t in a position to organize massive tree plantings or create complex ecoducts or wildlife underpasses. We didn’t have resources, people, or funding, just the will to start doing something, even if it was small, and the help of some friends.
So we came up with this simple, relatively cheap, quick, and thus doable solution of working within our little town’s neighborhoods. On February 14, 2019, we installed our first bridge in a rental called Gekkoes Lodge.
Our friend Auger, who had climbing experience, helped us install it. This first Sloth Crossing was sponsored by Big Wild Thought, a brand of sustainable clothing that has been supporting us since our early days.
The Largest Grid of Canopy Bridges in the World
Five years later, we (and by “We” we mean all our supporters, community, and us!) made the South Caribbean of Costa Rica, particularly Puerto Viejo de Talamanca, the place with the most single-rope canopy bridges in the world! Now, the Sloth Crossing Project is winning grants to facilitate its expansion into other regions.
300 Sloth Crossings Canopy Bridges
In the last week of May, our team traveled to Tortuguero to install more bridges and camera traps, and to collect habitat data. There, colleagues and locals told us that monkeys and sloths were frequently seen using fences, roofs, and power lines to move in the area near the school. The team went to the school and saw the monkeys and sloths in the area with their own eyes, as you can see in the images below. These photos were taken while the team was surveying the area.
We decided to install the bridges there, and one of them was the special Sloth Crossing n°300. The Sloth Crossing 300 is a 24-meter section that is part of a larger bridge structure of 94 meters (308 feet) with four sections, designed to cover and connect as many fragmented areas surrounding the school as possible.
We also installed camera traps, and we hope to see sloths and monkeys using them soon! You can read more details about our last trip to Tortuguero in this blog.
We want to give a very heartfelt thank you to everybody who sponsored a Sloth Crossing, everybody who donated to the project, and all the people in our town who allowed us to install a bridge on their property. This is yours to celebrate!
You can continue supporting this project by making a donation or by sponsoring your own bridge, which includes a wooden plaque with your chosen name. By adding a camera trap to your gift, you’ll also be contributing to our research.
Once again, thank you for reading up to here, and I wish you a wonderful start to June. See you in our next email, where we’ll be sharing footage from the last camera trap we took down. You won’t believe the amount of activity on that bridge!
-Cecilia Pamich
Communications & Outreach
