This morning, we encountered another coati while eating breakfast. It kept creeping closer, so I eventually had to stand up and try and scare it off. I didn’t want a coati eating my breakfast burrito.
After getting organized, we got in the car and headed out to the Bogarin Wildlife Trail. The previous day we had inquired with our hotel about an organized walk, but the receptionist told us they don’t promote the sloth tours anymore because the prices have gone up to $65 per person. She suggested doing one that is self-guided for $10 per person.
Interestingly enough, the different companies all kind of use the same network of trails, so even though our tickets were $10 per person, we were given the same access as people who paid much more. The downside is that it was very difficult for us to spot the sloths. They are slow-moving creatures who spend most of the day sleeping. They only come to ground about once per week to drop a deuce. Their digestive system works very slow you see. Furthermore, the dense canopy had us thinking that a clump of leaves or a shadow was a sloth. They are very well camouflaged with their dark, wet, mossy fur. The picture below is roughly our general vantage point of the trees.
As you can see, the sloth is not a creature that makes itself known. The fact that they sleep about 20 hours per day also means that one can’t just listen for a rustling of leaves from above. They like height, so even the guides brought special viewing scopes for their clients to use. The guides and tourists were much easier to spot than the sloths, so we would lurk about 50 meters behind and casually walk up slowly (sloth-like) to the area they had just stopped to observe. Even when we knew the general area where we might find a sloth, it still took us a few minutes to locate them.
We did not feel great about our sloth-finding skills, but we did encounter other wildlife, unassisted by guides mind you. We saw a lot of ants, butterflies, various birds, and a giant rat looking creature called a Red-Rumped agouti.
So perhaps we are not completely worthless. While scanning the treetops for more sloths, we heard something crashing through branches and landing on the ground 30 m away from us. It was a green macaw, and it didn’t look in good shape. We had seen what we thought was another bird dart off around the same time, so we don’t know if it had gotten into a fight or if it was perhaps attacked by a bird of prey.
It didn’t seem very happy about the situation, but we weren’t really capable of rendering assistance either. It was around this time that the rain started coming down.
In order to protect our camera equipment (and us), we forged on to one of the several “refuge” areas that were along the trail — basic covered shelters to protect people from the rain. I guess the trail makers are working under the assumption that it rains in the rainforest. It rained quite hard for a while before it let up enough for us to emerge from the shelter. We slowly (sloth-like) worked our way back to the exit and on our way.
After recovering back at our place, we walked around some more near our hotel in an area they called the “Frog Sanctuary.” We were hoping to see some red-eyed tree frogs, but no such luck. All we got out of our venture was some more bug bites.
Nevertheless, we consider ourselves successful in our search for sloths. We would have been very disappointed if we left Costa Rica without seeing any. We saw three!, which coincidentally is the same amount of toes that a sloth has.
passports & pepto bismol 