Sloths! Adorable sloths!

Last month when my offspring were visiting, we spent a bunch of time looking for sloths.  Unfortunately, it's hard to find them; often when we were told there were sloths in the tree canopy above us, they looked basically like a dark ball lumped in the tree; sometimes we got lucky and they looked like a furry ball lumped in the tree.  And once, three of us got super lucky and got to see a single sloth, way up high, slowly scratching itself.

So imagine how delighted I was when my friend Kimberly told me that the Panama Nature Center had just opened up a sloth sanctuary on the edge of the Ciudad del Saber, and that -- better yet -- they were having an open house.  Seeing sloths, and seeing my friend Kimberly: that's a winner! 

Many sloths moving slowly and cuddling with one another,
right in front of us.

Here's a 16-second video that Kimberly took of a sloth chewing.  If you speak Spanish, you can hear the tour guide describing how they develop and the difference between male and female 3-toed sloths (the ones we were looking at were 2-toed sloths, though). 

When they open and close their eyes, it is totally adorable, I should add.

Kimberly is also adorable, but not as furry as the sloths.

This is a place that rescues sloths, rehabilitates them, and releases them back into the wild.  The sloths we got to see were young (1-to-2 years old), so still suited to living in maternal groups.  The volunteers taught the sloths to forage for the right kind of food; when they get to be 2-years old, they're ready to go it on their own, and they get released back into the wild.

They also rescue a couple of other kinds of animals that we got to see.

This was an anteater, lying on its back.  

A baby anteater on the shoulder of a volunteer.

A porcupine in the hands of another volunteer.  

But clearly, the animals that won everyone's hearts and who were the slow-moving stars of the show were the sloths.  So adorable!

A sloth huddle.