By Monique Pool | Director and "Chief Sloth Catcher"
On the 27th of September 2022, we received a call for a tiny two-fingered sloth baby. The son of the person reporting the baby had given it the name Sheep. And that was because all mammals the little boy encountered were called sheep by him because that was a word the two-year-old knew! In our local language, this species of sloth is called Skapu-loiri, which is literally translated into Sheep-Sloth. So, we kept the name. The poor baby had fallen off its mother at birth. It survived the fall, but the man picked it up because he had ferocious cats that would have killed the infant sloth. We tried to coax the mother down, but the little one had stopped vocalizing after 24 hours without its mother, and it had started to dehydrate. We took the baby with us and, for two months, had sleepless nights to feed it during the nights, as the two-fingered sloths are nocturnal animals. Now, Sheep is enjoying life in the canopy after one year and six months. Although she never had a sloth mother to teach her how to explore the trees, she is trying it out on her own and maybe is getting some additional instructions from Cattaleya and Sid, who are also roaming the trees around the sanctuary. Sometimes, we find her worryingly close to the ground and woo her up again. There are anacondas and pumas around; we do not see them often, but she has no defense because she does not know what that is. Her mother was not there to teach her.
In the meantime, we have been so busy with rescues that we have not even been able to get everything in our database yet; we are far over 17 rescues for March. Why? What is different? It has been dry and hot, but not as dry as in 2019, when the leaves started falling off the trees. But there are fires; we experience the smoke coming from across the river and from coastal areas that spontaneously catch fire. A recent rescue came swimming across the Suriname River. Was it because of the fires? We do not know.
We thank you for your unwavering support for the sloths, anteaters, and armadillo friends. We look forward to giving you another update soon, as other changes are happening that may affect our animals as well.
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