Slothful days in Isla Linton!
Bamboozle
Jamie and Lucy Telfer
Thu 22 Oct 2009 00:03
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09:36.723N 079:35.220W
We are now at Isla Linton on the top side of the
bump of the Isthmus of Panama and have stopped here primarily to link up
with our old friends Paul and Maureen off Calypso, who left South Africa with us
on the Governor's Cup race back in 2004. We have not seen them
since Grenada in 2005 and it has been wonderful to catch up and share 4
years worth of salty tales as until now our travels have taken us in different
directions. Hopefully we may now see much more of them in the Pacific
in 2010! They spent almost a year living here in Linton or Garrote as the
village is officially called, a name which has not surprisingly fallen out of
common usage as more tourists start to visit the area!. They know the area
well and thanks to them we have just been introduced to the not
exactly rare, but oft unseen local creature, the sloth. Now I have to
confess my detailed knowledge of furry South American mammals is pretty
much limited to Paddington Bear who of course grew up a bit
further south in Peru but these little fellows are almost as
amazing. If you don't know much about sloths, they look a bit
like monkeys but they are in fact edentates (no front teeth!) which
strangely puts them in the same order as anteaters and armadillos but these
guys have a unique view of the world spending almost their
entire lives using their long claws to hang upside-down in the
trees. They do everything at a very leisurely pace, hence the
name but their movement has extraordinary grace.
Roger a retired cruiser, who has swallowed the hook
and moved ashore has managed to successfully raise 4 of these unique
creatures, a pair of the two-toed and a pair of the three-toed
varieties. Roger and his wife Binny came in to possession
of their first sloth when they rescued and adopted a little
one whose Mum had just been killed with a machete (the locals will eat them
given half a chance). They managed to persuade a vet (who had
never seen a sloth before) to stitch up a machete wound across the
youngster's face and since then, with a great deal of time
and effort, they have managed to accumulate the skills
and knowledge to enable them to provide the sloths with an
environment in which they seem both happy and healthy. After their
efforts with the first they clearly developed a reputation as "the sloth
people" as since then, several others have been rescued and entrusted into their
care. Apparently sloths do not generally
adapt well to life outside their native jungle and very few of the world's
zoos manage to keep them healthy for very long but here in their home in
Linton, Roger and Binny seem to have succeeded beyond their wildest
expectations. It has clearly been quite a challenge and become a
labour of love to care for them and the constant quest for the right kind
of wild leaves and fruit from up in the jungle canopy provides good long term
employment prospects for several local villagers. Sadly returning
them to the wild is not an option as in each case the young sloths have
missed the opportunity to learn from their parents how to live in the wild,
and the Panamanian jungle is not a place in which they will live long
without those skills. They don't even like the rain very much which is of
course a bit limiting if you are supposed to live in the
rainforest but they seem more than happy hanging
(upside-down) on the elaborate, but dry, climbing frame provided for them in the
house. As a sign of how unusual it is to manage to keep these
creatures, if the sloths need any medical assistance they now have to
specially fly a vet down from Costa Rica as nobody in Panama has knowledge
or the experience to deal with them. As you can probably tell it was a
very special treat meeting Roger and his sloths and another of those totally
unexpected experiences that crop up when cruising
Lucy & Pippin (the sloth) with Paul and
Maureen from Calypso
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