14 
ZOOLOGICAL SOCIETY BULLETIN 
The sloth is adapted to a life of hanging 
from or climbing up branches, and on the 
ground can only hook itself slowly along to 
the base of the nearest tree. Except when 
actually travelling through the trees, it does 
not however, keep to an inverted position. 
While so helpless on the ground, it swims 
readily. I have photographed a sloth swim¬ 
ming to shore and have captured no fewer than 
twelve of these animals which were making 
their way across a mile wide river. 
Where Cecropia trees are abundant, sloths 
will sometimes spend many weeks in one lim¬ 
ited locality, hut on the other hand when they 
wish, they can cover considerable distances. 
At certain seasons of the year, there is a migra¬ 
tion of sorts, and all the sloths in a district 
will he found moving in one general direction. 
I once caught a sloth and after keeping it 
YOUNG THREE TOED SLOTII 
Head of a month old sloth 
T H R E E - TO ED SI. O T H S 
Heads of adult female and young 
remaining days. As there was a full moon 
during the interval it is probable that the ani¬ 
mal made some of its progress at night. 
The human failing of exaggeration in the 
estimate of speed is as evident in the case of 
slowness as of rapidity. A race horse may seem 
fairly to fly over the ground, until pulled down 
to the actual record by a stop watch, and to all 
the earlier observers, the fact of the unusual 
slowness of sloths led to the most ridiculous esti¬ 
mates of their speed. One man said that a 
sloth spent its whole life on a single tree, the 
leaves sprouting on one branch before it had 
finished feeding on another. 
Of those under my observation, a mother 
sloth on the ground, speeded up by the calls 
of her infant, made fourteen feet in one minute, 
and while I have known this to be considerable’ 
ADULT THREE-TOED SLOTH 
Profile of the head 
for five days I tied a metal tag to its leg and 
shaved two patches of hair from the sides of the 
hack, on the edge of the orange dorsal spot. 
I liberated it in the jungle and forty-eight days 
later it was brought to me by an Indian from 
his clearing a long distance off, and across the 
Mazaruni River. To reach this spot the sloth 
must have gone west to the river bank from 
the spot where I liberated it, then turned south¬ 
west and taken to the water about two miles 
further up river, then swum a mile west and 
down to the spot where it was seen to come ashore. 
The metal tag was gone but the shaved spots 
were unmistakable. The total distance covered 
was at least four miles of jungle and one of 
river. Allowing a single day for the latter 
feat, we have an average of about one hundred 
and fifty yards of direct travel for each of the 
