Photography workshop at Kukula Kids’ Club! 

Photography workshop at Kukula Kids’ Club!

The Kukula Kids’ Club, a new initiative for The Sloth Conservation Foundation, aims to enable and empower children with additional educational classes, gain new skills through workshops and provide them with fun activities they may not usually have access to due to geographical or financial barriers.

Recently we teamed up with the amazing Girls Who Click foundation to arrange a week-long photography workshop for the 11 children in our Kukula Kids’ Club.

 

The Kukula Kids’ Club

All of our children in the club, aged 7-12, also participate in the El Puente – The Bridge project. This incredible organization has been serving the indigenous community for decades, they give space to hundreds of indigenous families, helping to provide; food, cultural events, classes, clothing, and school supplies, among many other things.

 

 

We wanted the Kukula club to serve the indigenous communities of the area so we were so grateful to team up with El Puente for this. One of the pillars of SloCo’s mission is to actively work with other organizations, individually we can make small changes, but together we can have a huge impact. El Puente worked with us to choose 11 children that attended their project to be our first group of the new Kukula Club.

Girls Who Click

We also teamed up with Girls Who Click (GWC), a nonprofit organization based in the San Francisco Bay Area, to bring photography to our Kukukla kids. Founded by Suzi Eszterhas, an award-winning wildlife photographer, she sought to create a foundation to inspire young girls to join the nature and wildlife photography industry.

In a heavily male-dominated field, they aimed to bridge this gap and, to do so, partner with full-time working professional photographers around the country to offer free nature photography workshops for teen girls.

 

GWC kindly offered to send one of their partners, the amazing Diana Caballero, to give a free week-long workshop to our kids. Diana, from Mexico, is an amazing photographer in her own right, and we couldn’t wait to host her here and give the children this amazing opportunity.

The initiative:

For the photography workshop, we wanted to provide the kids with the necessary tools and knowledge to learn to use the camera as a means of photographic expression through play and experimentation. Through the activities, we wanted to show them how our gaze is a very powerful instrument to share what we are and what surrounds us.

 

The cameras

Most of the children do not have access to cameras or phones, so when we decided to do a workshop with them, we knew that we wanted to be able to provide them with their own cameras. We used this digital camera and they ended up being the perfect little cameras for the kids. Thank you to everyone who helped support this project so that we were able to provide this item for the children to use.

The photography workshop:

During our 4-day workshop, Diana set a variety of activities for the children to do so they could learn how to use their cameras and also understand different methods for taking photos. We also set them homework each day to do specific photography assignments at home.

  • We explain what the camera is, the elements that make it up, how it works, who invented it, and its evolution to this day.
  • We play and explore the multiple possibilities of looking through a rectangle made with a piece of cardboard that simulates the viewfinder of a camera.
  • We observe our pet, we follow it everywhere and we take pictures of it. We share and exchange experiences of our pets during the workshop.
  • We take our favorite toy and imagine a normal day in the life of the toy. We take 10 photographs recounting its life. At the end of the activity, we tell how its life is.
  • We take photos representing different emotions, for example, joy, sadness, anger, fear, and surprise.
    We imagine that we are very small beings, like an ant, a beetle, a dragonfly, a bee…
  • We become that being and we see many things that we could not see with the naked eye; details and textures, what used to be small can now be something huge.
  • We incorporate the latest images, review all our photographic work and make a group selection to present an exhibition.

 

An unexpected visit

We were also lucky to be visited by a sloth on day 3 – this was amazing and it came down so low that we were able to get amazing photos of the sloth – the perfect gift for our Kukula Club kids!

 

Photo by Nash

 

Photo by Jorge

 

Photo by Ester

 

Photo by Ester

 

Photo by Daishy

The future of the Photography workshop:

We exhibited the children’s photos at El Puente over the weekend so that during their soup kitchen that Saturday, the families who visit El Puente, would be able to see all the kids’ hard work. Now that the children have been taught how to use the cameras we plan to continue working with them and having them photograph different experiences. We have met twice since the workshop and they have worked on getting the following photos:

  • A beach landscape photo
  • A photo of movement i.e. dancing, running, jumping
  • Photos of the great green macaws

 

 

We want to be able to continue to nurture the children’s passion for photography and capturing the world around them. In October, for international sloth day, we are also planning on doing a huge exhibition with the kids’ photos to showcase their talent at the event.

In the future we hope to give this workshop to more children in the area, continuing to work with Girls Who Click to do so.

-Sarah Kennedy
Director of Education & Outreach

Tales from the Jungle: April 2022

Tales from the Jungle: April 2022

Happy April everyone! We hope you survived any April Fools pranks from the beginning of the month, had a happy Easter with friends and family if you so celebrate, appreciated some jazz (what, you didn’t know it was Jazz Appreciation Month?), and ate some yummy food on National Empanada Day, which was April 8th. Because the only thing better than an empanada is a holiday devoted to them!

 

Here in Costa Rica, the defining holidays are Semana Santa, or Holy Week, when in addition to religious observances, every tourist in the whole country goes to the beach. Our tiny beach town was glutted with tourists (and their cars), which made it difficult to get anywhere. Sloth tracking was a challenge, but the Tracking Team rose to the challenge, sloths were tracked, and the holidays survived.

Speaking of sloths, we’ve had a bit of a change up with one of the Urban Sloth Project’s sloths, read on to find out who!

 

The Adventures of Nacho

Nacho has officially been released from the Urban Sloth Project. Although he was one of the most interesting sloths we monitored and we really enjoyed tracking him, we kept having problems with his equipment being stolen. Check out our blog here to read more of Nacho’s story and what we learned from him!

 

The Urban Sloth Project is a long-term study on how the urbanization of their environment affects sloths. We’re currently monitoring eight sloths, and you can get updates by joining our VIP community! We send out updates and pictures every month.

 

New milestone for our Education Program!

 

Our Sloth School Program, a local and online educational enrichment program focusing on sloths, has now reached 5,000 children! We offer sloth lessons via zoom, and if this sounds like something you or some children you know are interested in, please contact us.

Part of SloCo’s educational outreach program is the Kukula Club, where children can meet in person to learn about how sloths live and are studied in the wild. One of the most popular activities is learning about using radio frequency technology to track sloths. 

 

To do this, we hide a stuffed sloth wearing a radio collar, and the kids get to find it using the portable antenna and radio receiver box. Future sloth scientists in the making!

 

 

Sloth Crossing Team Goes to the Pacific!

Our Bridge Team traveled to Ojochal and Uvita on the Pacific side of Costa Rica to install some wildlife bridges and managed to put up eight bridges in four days, including one at Parque Nacional Marino Ballena. Go team!  Special thanks to Reserva Playa Tortuga who helped us organize and coordinate this trip!  

 

 

While we were there, SloCo also visited this amazing school Life Project Education at Ojochal and had a great time meeting all the amazing children who attend.

 

 

This school has bought the plot of land next door in order to save it from deforestation, and the students have started to reforest it. We built a sloth crossing bridge to help wildlife until the trees are big enough to create a natural canopy connection!

 

Our latest “versus” blog is out!

This time we have sloths vs red pandas! Can you think of any similarities between the two species? Check out the blog for some surprising comparisons. Support our friends from The Red Panda Network and their amazing work to protect these incredible animals!

 

 

Does this ancient cave art represent a giant ground sloth with its baby?

 

Ice Age megafauna rock art in the Colombian Amazon? José Iriarte, Michael J. Ziegler, Alan K. Outram, Mark Robinson, Patrick Roberts, Francisco J. Aceituno, Gaspar Morcote-Ríos and T. Michael Keesey.

Beautiful cave paintings in Colombia have sparked some controversy, but we want to know what you think. Giant ground sloth? Abstract art? Proof of extraterrestrial life visiting planet Earth? Find out in our latest paleo sloths entry.

  • Read More: Prehistoric Rock Art Might be Early Representations of Giant Ground Sloths

 

This is not fine!

 

The latest IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report has brought us some scary news that many of us were aware of, but can now confirm. Many impacts of global warming are now simply “irreversible” according to the UN’s latest assessment. If by 2025 global emissions haven’t dropped, we will all be facing catastrophic climate events.

 

sloth meme this is not fine

 

 

This report has demonstrated the importance of demanding global environmental change from our leaders. We need governments and large corporations to move at a faster pace to impact positive global change rather, because the sloth pace we are currently going at isn’t working. Sloths can’t outrun climate change!

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Big Wild Thought is an amazing company helping so many animals all around the world. Their clothing is of beautiful quality with delicately embroidered animals, and we love it. Head over to their page to check out their sloth attire, 10% of all proceeds will be donated to helping us help sloths! 

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donate monthly

 

Have you considered a monthly donation to your favorite conservation program? Monthly gifts help us ensure all our projects are funded and organize our budget more efficiently!

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Thank you so much for tuning into this month’s newsletter, and we’ll see you again next month with more weird adventures from the jungle. Summer begins the nice, easy, slow season down here, and we are all looking forward to less traffic, beautiful weather (maybe), and taking lessons from the sloths about taking it easy. Cheers!

 

-SloCo Team