This was Pete’s fantasy…wrestling a jaguar…but there are no jaguars on BCI, only ocelots. This one is pure photoshop.

More little biters… We came back across the same log from September. The light was just right to show us a cloud of bees across the trail. We inspected the entry and took deep breaths and then calmly walked through the cloud of bees. They are stingless and they won’t go for you unless you seem to be attacking their home. The worst that would happen would be several hundred tiny pinches before they flew off again.

This big fella was just along the path between dorm buildings on BCI. He spends his daytimes under a slab of concrete in the cool dark shadows, but he’s a night hunter. He’s about seven inches long with his legs tucked.

I resist calling this howler monkey Clayton Chesney. He is a simple creature of the forest. A nature spirit, NOT a country music sensation.

As we neared the end of trail on day one, Pete spotted a dark, still lump in a tree near the interpretive center construction. The workers had left the site for the day to take the boat back to Gamboa, so it had been quiet. We awakened him with stupid human noises… In a few minutes, he was joined by several colleagues who hung by tails and legs from branches…and then they took off to a larger group and continued moving. We could track their movement by the raucous trademark soundtrack.

This sloth is hanging from a capture noose, trying to imagine her escape. Bryson Voirin, a doctoral student from the Max Planck Institute in Germany, is studying sloths here in Panama. He took us on a sloth hunt, using radio telemetry in Bocas del Toro. We found this adult female and watched as Bryson climbed from the boat, up into a tall mangrove with the noose. He gently pulled her out of the tree and brought her down for our inspection. She was hissing at first, and trying some half-hearted biting…but soon settled down and let us inspect her. As you can see, their best survival tactic is their invisibility. Once they’ve been spotted by a predator, it’s almost always over. But they flourish in the tropics.

These “toes” have jagged ridges on the underside that help the sloth get a grip on tree branches. The fur is dry and algae-covered in places. The fur follicles are cracked and porous. At least one scientist was theorizing that nutrients could be absorbed through the fur. Also, there is a species of moth, appropriately called a Sloth Moth that lives exclusively on sloths. They are the same warm grey color as the fur and are hard to spot, until you head in closer.

Bryson names his radio-collared sloths after Disney princesses. This sweet three-toed was Jasmine. He said he has 25-30 sloths radio-collared in the area we were searching in Bocas del Toro. We also met Cinderella, but she was in an agitated state and kept hissing and attempting to bite.

Photos by Richard Schooley ©2011