Maned Sloths in Brazil

[Lola]

Hi All,
In case you haven't noticed by now, I'm a National Geographic junkie- here's a great excerpt from an article on Brazil's costal rainforests- ENJOY! (I'm also attaching a cute photo of a Sloth included in the article) You can check out the original article at: http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/...geographic.com


The Rainforest in Rio's Backyard

By Virginia Morrell Photographs by Mark W. Moffett

The once vast Atlantic forest of Brazil survives only as a scattering of green islands in a sea of human sprawl. Now scientists have plans to save its remnants from the rising tide of development.

Get a taste of what awaits you in print from this compelling excerpt.

"It's always like this," says Adriano Chiarello. "You know they're here, but you can't see them." The Brazilian conservation biologist bends his neck backward like a yoga master to peer at a tree's uppermost branches a hundred feet (30 meters) above us. Somewhere in the leafy canopy, a female maned sloth and her eight-month-old infant are hidden from view. A steadily beeping radio signal from the mother's collar has brought Chiarello to the base of the tree, but even technology has its limits. The biologist must now spot the pair the old-fashioned way: with his eyes alone.

"If they don't move, we may never see them," Chiarello sighs. "And you know, they really are sloths. They spend hours sitting, sleeping, never moving. That's what they do 80 to 90 percent of the day: nothing."

He wipes his eyes, shakes his head, then returns to his craning yoga pose. "Wait. . . . Maybe my insult has worked. Look there—right over your head. She's braced against a branch."

I follow Chiarello's pointed finger and spy the mother's dark brown face among the leaves. She buries her face under her arm and looks instantly like a large, furred coconut or bees' nest.

"Do you see that? How she can vanish?" Chiarello asks. "For their size, they are so well camouflaged. And . . . wow! Now she's moving!"

For Chiarello, such a sloth-on-the-move sighting is a peak experience, the ultimate biological moment that holds the promise of new insights.

The baby sloth, looking like a Teletubby wearing a curly lambskin coat, emerges from its mother's arms. It climbs over her and then playfully—lazily—slaps at its mother's face. The mother does nothing in return. "They never respond to their babies," whispers Chiarello, adding that mother sloths neither play nor get angry with their offspring. Instead, with all the speed of a desert tortoise, the mother reaches an arm out to a nearby branch and nibbles the leaves.

Chiarello's graduate students—at the Catholic University of Minas Gerais, where he's a professor—busily take notes. We all stretch our necks, craning this way and that, to keep the sloths in view as the pair move like sleepwalking high-wire artists along the branches to the freshest leaves. Astonishingly, given the mother's 15-pound (7-kilogram) build, she and her baby hang from the pencil-thin twigs like strange, half-animated fruits.

Chiarello's "main actress," as he fondly refers to the mother sloth, is the star in his study, funded in part by the National Geographic Society, of the endangered mammals of the São Lourenço Municipal Park, a small fragment of Brazil's Atlantic forest, or Mata
Atlântica as the Brazilians call it. Like many mammals here, the maned sloth has lost huge tracts of its original habitat since the first Portuguese mariners stepped ashore in April 1500.

Get the whole story in the pages of National Geographic magazine.




-- Man, articles like this make me want to just pack up and run off to live in the rainforest to protect the forest and take photographs!
Happy Travels,
Lola