Lucy Cooke, who made a documentary for Animal Planet called Too Cute! Baby Sloths, here provides fascinating facts about these unusual mammals, along with stunning photographs (by herself and several other photographers). Did you know that it takes four weeks for a sloth to digest a meal? That three-fingered sloths are the only mammals on the planet with extra neck vertebrae? They can turn their heads up to 270 degrees. And yes, sloths do spend 70% of their time "resting."
Judy Arroyo is the "sloth whisperer." It all started when Buttercup, a three-fingered sloth just a few weeks old, turned up on her doorstep almost 20 years ago. As word of Buttercup's rescue spread, Arroyo's sloth population grew. Today she cares for 150 orphaned and injured animals at the Avairios del Caribe sloth sanctuary in Costa Rica. Photos capture the sloths in their few waking hours climbing jungle gyms, eating hot pink flowers and descending a tree to "do their business" (they eliminate only once a week). Cooke calls baby sloths the "Jedi masters of the hug." Mateo hugs a stuffed cow, Sunshine and Sammy hug each other and, "collectively, they form a cuddle puddle."
Any reader who witnesses the up-close photographs of the endearing thin-lined closed-mouth smiles, the wide-set button-black eyes and shiny wet noses of these mammal babies clutching a stuffed yellow rabbit, blankies and bears and doesn't say "Awww! That's so cute" has a heart of stone. --Lisa Von Drasek, blogger at EarlyWord and curator of the Children's Literature Research Collections