One morning we arrived at the construction site to find a sloth crawling across the road. Its destination, apparently, was the eight-foot scaffolding post near the front of the house.

Sloths spend almost all of their time in trees where their camouflage and stillness keep them from drawing attention of eagles and jaguars. When sloths come down, it’s usually for their weekly bathroom break, and that’s when they are most vulnerable. It seems that Mother Nature could have gone the extra mile and provided sloths with a bombardier style potty instinct; but as sloths tend to hang leg-high in the trees, it’s probably a good thing they don’t attempt this.

Our sloth had the misfortune of coming down from the tree across the street from our work site just as a group of school kids was walking by. The kids had scared the sloth away from its preferred tree and the poor animal was “fleeing” across the street to our scaffolding, the only other reasonably high refuge in the immediate surroundings.

Eventually the sloth made it, but then Julian, one of our brick masons, put it back in the road so we could all watch it crawl some more. Julian offered to straightjacket the freaked out critter in some newspaper and then wheel-barrow it the 8 blocks – on bumpy unpaved roads – for a show-and-tell at the other Habitat site. But fortunately Doug was able to find the right Spanish words and convince Julian to carry the sloth back to its original tree across the street.

This is a three-toed sloth, as opposed to a two-toed sloth. The distinction is made not by the number of toes – all sloths have three toes on each of their two hindfeet - but by the number of “fingers” on their “hands." I found my photo op while the sloth was crawling up a scaffolding post, and I was glad not to discover if the sloth uses these claws defensively.

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