Señorita Sloth

Or, Paula La Perezosa perhaps…

This is a female three-toed sloth. You can tell that she is “three-toed” because if you look closely at her hands, you can see that she has three long claws on each one. 

As for her gender, I only know that she is female per my friend Gustavo. He is a local tour guide and was watching the sloth with me. He said that he rescued her from the road a few days prior. That must have been when he detected her gender. 

The tree you see Paula climbing through is a lagartillo tree. Sloths come to this type of tree to drink water.

Look at the picture of the lagartillo tree leaf that I have posted below. You can see how the edges of the leaves are rounded—like a banana boat (for lack of better comparison)—which means that they often catch and hold rain that sloths can then come drink.

The other type of tree that sloths like to inhabit is a cecropia, or guarumo tree, pictured below. Sloths like these trees to eat their leaves.

They don’t have a lot of competition for these leaves either. Sloths and howler monkeys are the only two types of animals in the world that eat cecropia tree leaves, according to Gustavo.

(I had to steal this picture below from the Internet because I forgot to take one of the cecropia tree I saw.)

Here are a few more pictures of Paula: