Baby sloth found crying on floor in Costa Rica reunited with mom. See ‘special moment’

A rescue center was able to reunite a baby sloth with his mama after he was found alone crying in Costa Rica, officials said.

“We got a call on Oct. 10 that someone had found a baby three-fingered sloth crying on the ground of Manzanillo National Park,” Noelia Ortiz, Jaguar Rescue Center’s community manager, told McClatchy News in a phone interview.

One of the rescue’s members drove over from the center located in Playa Chiquita to the national park about five miles away, Ortiz said.

“The protocol is to wrap the baby in a blanket and look up to see if you can find the mom. Then the baby is checked out to see if it’s injured or not,” she said.

Luckily, the baby boy wasn’t injured. After the rescue team couldn’t see the mama, he was taken to their center and given goat milk as a substitute for his mom’s milk, she said.

“Like with any animal we receive, we check for injuries and dehydration. We always joke that mom sloths aren’t the best moms ever because the baby will fall from them and they’ll just be like ‘oops,” she said.

The baby was then moved to the nursery to be cared for, as “three-fingered sloths are actually very delicate animals,” Ortiz said.

“The best thing to happen is to give them back to their mom,” she said. “No one can take better care of them.”

The ‘speaker method’

While the baby is in the nursery, the team makes the baby cry so it can begin the process of the “speaker method,” Ortiz said.

The “speaker method” has been used by the Jaguar Rescue Center for the past 15 years. The process includes recording the baby cry and then going back to the spot where they were found and playing the sound in hopes the mother comes.

“We kinda invented the method. Each baby has a unique cry and the mom can identify the cry,” Ortiz said.

The following day, the team went back to the national park, where eventually the mother appeared.

“We started playing the recording and didn’t see any mom in the trees,” she said. “It wasn’t until a tourist said ‘look there’s a sloth’ that the team thought ‘what are the odds.’”

Ortiz said she used three recordings. The first didn’t catch the mama’s attention, the second caught her interest and by the third, she “knew it was her kid.”

The task can take hours as the sloth will begin to come down for their baby before deciding to “go back up in the trees,” Ortiz said.

The process of playing the sounds took around 40 minutes, she said.

When the mother gets low enough, the team will stop the recording and have the baby do a “live cry,” she said.

A ‘special reunion’

The mama can be seen grabbing her baby when a team member holds him up as he’s crying for her. The “special moment” posted to TikTok on Oct. 13 gathered over 3.4 million views as of Oct. 24.

But Ortiz said this reunion was different as she witnessed something for the first time.

“The mom grabbed her baby and started smelling him,” she said.

Ortiz said the mom then started licking the baby as if “he smelled like the blanket or clinic and wanted to give him his smell back.”

“This was a very special reunion,” she said.