photo gallery:  nyc

i know i promised that the galleries would offer a respite from rants, but this one's worth telling.

"matilda" is a two-toed sloth who lives in the central park zoo's rainforest pavilion.

matilda spends most of her time in such well-hidden obscurity that even zookeepers who have worked there for years have seen her only once or twice. many never see her at all (although they all seem to have stories about "that new keeper who saw her twice the first week they worked here.")

sloths well deserve their deadly-sin namesake –– they sleep most of the day, barely move at all when they're awake, and are generally happiest if you would just go visit some other animal. the main atrium of the rainforest pavilion has dense foliage so it's easy for matilda to be a very happy sloth indeed.

surely other animals must resent her. they work hard for their high-protein biscuits and birdseed day in and day out, getting mis-identified by well-meaning parents ("look at the flamingo, stewie, up in that tree! look at the flamingo!") and generally being on point all the time while matilda secludes herself in the thickest foliage and does nothing for most of the month. through our various inquiries we learned that she limits her appearances to the rare evening around closing time when she climbs down to drink or poop (rare because sloths take care of such business about once every week or two. hey, they're sloths.) but we love an animal challenge and so decided that we were going to get ourselves a sloth-sighting.

alas, frequent visits to the zoo turned up nothing matilda-wise. after more than a year of trying very, very hard to spot her we began to wonder whether or not she actually existed. of course, every time we asked the keepers about her they always promised us that yes, she is real, she's here somewhere, she's healthy and well, blah blah blah… were we being pranked? it was getting hard to tell for sure.

then, on the first standard-time sunday of the fall, we dropped in at the pavilion close enough to closing time to require some haste in our visit. the atrium area relies primarily on the sun for light and with the earlier hour of darkness things were quickly becoming very murky in there. zoo-goers were being shooed out by staff but for some reason we lingered in the gloom, becoming almost the last people left.

we were making our way to the exit with one of the volunteers (we'd been discussing matilda with her) when two girls ahead of us started pointing at something down below us, asking each other "what is that thing?" the keeper looked down and said "hello, matilda!" sure enough she'd been right below us, rolling around under the walkway (an unusual location for a sloth, who generally prefers to hang upside-down from a tree branch).

we'd heard that news of a sighting tends to spread through the keeper community like wildfire and sure enough, several of them materialized out of the woodwork to catch a glimpse; one official had some rather impressive camera gear with him. so it was us and the keepers gushing over the rock-star sloth, while the remaining visitors (who did not seem to be "matilda-conscious", but were becoming matilda-curious in a hurry) were getting shooed out rather emphatically by a staff person. we'd waited over a year for this chance however, and we were not giving up that easily. my companion looked at the the shoo-er and said, "i'll move as fast as matilda does".

amazingly we saw matilda again on our next visit. we spotted her ourselves this time, mostly obscured by thick vines. she was clinging to a wall-mounted birdhouse, too much in shadow to be photographed with much success (by me, anyway). we pointed her out to a passing zoo staff member who immediately got on her walkie-talkie, and once again keepers and volunteers converged to catch a glimpse. visitors seemed a bit perplexed… we were all standing in one spot staring at a spot on the wall and i guess they must have thought it was some kind of test or something.