The rope bridges built so sloths never have to touch the ground

By Earth to Sea News · August 2026

On the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica there are now 378 of them, strung tree to tree above the roads.

A sloth on the ground is a sloth in trouble. Everything about the animal is built for hanging: the long curved claws, the slow deliberate reach, the grip that can hold a body up for a lifetime. Put that same body on a road and it becomes almost helpless. So when a forest gets cut through by a road, a driveway or a run of power lines, the gap is not a minor inconvenience for the animals living in the canopy, it is a wall. On the South Caribbean coast of Costa Rica, The Sloth Conservation Foundation set about solving this in the simplest way anyone could think of. They started tying ropes between the trees.

The idea grew. As of February this year there are 378 of these canopy bridges, which the foundation believes is the largest network of its kind anywhere, reconnecting more than 8,000 hectares of forest across hundreds of private properties, most of them ordinary people's gardens. The basic version is a single rope run between two hardwood trees with native vines trained along it until the crossing becomes a living thing rather than a piece of equipment. A rope can only span about thirty metres before it sags too far, so longer crossings are built in linked sections: the longest, put up in 2024, runs 55 metres across four trees. More than twenty species have been recorded using them and over 1,200 crossings logged, and in February the cameras caught a three fingered sloth and a howler monkey on the same bridge. There is a lovely difficulty in this work, which is that sloths are genuinely hard to record: they move too slowly to reliably trip a motion sensor and run too cool to trip a heat one. Some of them have been crossing all along without ever telling anybody.