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July 2024 | Tales From The Jungle

July 2024 | Tales From The Jungle

Hello, dear Sloth Community! The peak of summer and the rainy season has brought us big thunderstorms, flooding, and the high season for tourism in Costa Rica. Despite these challenges, we have continued with our usual work of planting trees and installing canopy bridges, spaying and neutering rescued dogs, and monitoring our sloths for the Urban Sloth Project. We have also taken an important step in our latest research initiative, The Great Sloth Census.

This month has also been very special for me as I was awarded with an honorary doctorate degree (DSc) from Swansea University last week.
This recognition isn’t just for me—it’s for our entire team at The Sloth Conservation Foundation, who work tirelessly to make the world a safer place for sloths.

 

 

It is also for everyone who has supported our research and conservation projects from the very beginning.
I am incredibly grateful for our team and our global community, and truly proud of all the initiatives and projects we have developed together to study and protect sloths. You can watch the award ceremony and my speech in the video below!

 

The official start of the Great Sloth Census

Our research team, led by our biologist José Guzmán, started the arduous task of walking the transects for the Great Sloth Census this month. Each transect covers 1 hectare, split into 10 100m x 100m squares in the forest. The team have to cover each square in detail to collect information about the trees, terrain types, and other features.

 

 

Then, we count the sloths we observe using both our eyes and the thermal drone. Keysha, our scat detection dog, also searches for sloth scat piles on the ground. By combining all of this information, we can start to understand how many sloths live in each area and how this varies with different habitat types. We can also assess the efficiency and accuracy of the 3 different sloth detection methods, before eventually expanding the project nationwide.

 

This task is easier to describe than to execute: the area we are working in is a primary forest, meaning the jungle is thick. Due to the rains, it’s also muddy, hot, humid, and in some parts, there are hills and slopes! Besides the challenging terrain, the team has to deal with wasp and bullet ant stings and be careful not to step on the small venomous snakes sleeping on the ground.

 

 

It is undoubtedly a difficult project, but collecting this data is an essential next step for getting sloths the legal protection and conservation status that they need. A big shoutout to our current volunteers for muddling through the jungle with us this month and helping us to collect this important data: Catalina from Colombia, Anne and Nicolai from Denmark, Louis from Switzerland, Mike from Australia, and Sian from the UK!

 

A big thanks to Daughters For Earth

 

We want to thank Daughters for Earth, an organization that supports conservation by funding women-led initiatives around the world, for providing us with a $15,000 grant to help us take our Connected Gardens Project to the next level! Thanks to this grant, we were able to hire our new manager for the project, Deily Mora, an agronomist with experience working with communities and women in rural areas of Costa Rica.

 

 

With the addition of Deily to the team, we can now expand not only the capacity of our forest nursery but also extend our efforts beyond our region and start planning larger reforestation projects to regenerate more sloth habitats in the South Caribbean.

 

Team Sloth Goes to Gandoca

Our Connected Gardens team visited the southern village of Gandoca to survey the area and talk with the locals to learn more about the wildlife-human conflicts and the challenges regarding conservation in the area.

 

 

The team evaluated potential sites for reforestation and the installation of our Sloth Crossings canopy bridges on private properties. We also had a meeting with officials from the electrical company ICE to identify sites over the main roads and streets where canopy bridges could be installed.

Help the sloths!

 

There are many ways you can help the sloths and support our work: You can make a donation, sponsor a project, or symbolically adopt one of our sloths (the adorable Tender is now available for physical adoptions!).

Adopt a Sloth 

Monthly donations are a fantastic way to support because they enable us to ensure consistent funds and better organize our budget for our projects. You can donate any amount, and starting from $25/month, you can join our VIP community and receive monthly updates on all the sloths we are monitoring for the Urban Sloth Project, as well as access to biographies, illustrations, and photos!

Join our VIP Community!

Thank You for the journey

With all the events that occurred in the past week, I couldn’t help but reminisce about my early days as a Zoology student and the initial moments of SloCo. I vividly remember sitting in the bioscience lab at Swansea University – I was supposed to be writing my PhD thesis but instead, I was typing into Google “how to start a charity.”

Back then, I had no idea what I was doing, but within a few short years, that charity grew to be one of the biggest organisation in the world for sloths. I am so proud to now be leading a team that is making a real difference to help sloths in the wild. But it’s also your support that makes all of this possible, and I am incredibly grateful for that. Thank YOU!

All the best from the jungle

 

Dr Rebecca Cliffe

Founder and Executive Director

 

 

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