by Todd Katzner
July 11, 2005
Page 1 : May 21 - 24, 2005
21-22 May 2005 (Saturday, Sunday) Coming into the country
When most people think about Georgia, they think about Atlanta and peaches. That ain’t me. For me, Georgia is a small country on the other side of the world, biologically and culturally diverse. Georgia is one of four countries from the former Soviet Union that include the Caucasus mountains. These mountains stretch from the north-east shores of the Black Sea to the western shores of the Caspian Sea. To the north of Georgia lies Russia, the big boss of the region. To the east and south are Armenia and Azerbaijan. The Caucasus area has recently been recognized as an extremely important center for biodiversity and endemism (“high endemism” means that many of the species that occur there are found in no other place in the world). What these biological assessments miss is that the Caucasus is also a remarkable region for cultural diversity and endemism—even though there are only four countries in the region, there are hundreds of peoples, languages and cultures. In short, this is a truly remarkable place to visit and in which to conduct research.
Getting to Georgia from my home in Pittsburgh is never easy, and this year it was especially difficult because of the timing of my flights. I left Pittsburgh at 3:00 PM on a flight bound for Detroit. There I had a short two-hour layover and then flew on to Amsterdam. While that flight was nearly 8 hours, the flight was not nearly as difficult as the 12-hour layover I had in the Amsterdam airport. It is not easy to kill time trying to work and read, all the while fighting off jet lag (the 7:00 AM to 7:00 PM layover in Amsterdam was actually from 1:00 AM to 1:00 PM, according to my body’s internal clock, which was set to eastern standard time). Finally once my flight took off, it was another four hours to Tbilisi, the capital of the Republic of Georgia.
Arriving in Georgia is interesting, and much like arriving in many cities in the former Soviet Union. Getting off the plane at 2:00 AM can be a bit confusing and usually involves buses, then there are long customs lines and frowning officials (this time one smiled at me—a first!!) and then, once you’ve got your bags, a gauntlet of taxi drivers, each hoping to get you into town in their car. Thankfully I was met by my friend and colleague Lexo Gavshelishvilli (Lexo is short for Alexander and “shvili” means “child of”—much like many English names that end in “son”), who works for the Georgian Center for the Conservation of Wildlife (GCCW). Lexo took me to his home, gave me a snack and I immediately went to sleep.
23 May 2005 (Monday) Jet lag recovery
I woke up fairly late this morning, a good thing since we’d arrived so late the night before. Most of this day was spent taking care of office business. The GCCW office is remarkable—it has high-speed internet access and a staff of about 15 people, biologists and administrators, who are all passionate about conservation and about Georgia. Probably the highlight of my day was my talk with Ramaz, Lexo’s boss and the director of GCCW. Generally we talked about what I wanted to do here and ways that GCCW and the National Aviary (where I work) could collaborate on projects. Ramaz is a truly impressive strategic thinker who, together with Lexo and another biologist named David, has built GCCW into the foremost conservation NGO (non-governmental organization, similar to what we call a “non-profit”) in Georgia. In fact, I think that this NGO may be the most impressive such organization that I have encountered in the former Soviet Union.
At the end of the day, after several e-mails to family and friends, letting them know I’d arrived safely, Lexo and I went to Ramaz’s house, where he and his wife Lela served us dinner and we had a really nice conversation. Although I was dragging pretty strongly by the end of the evening (the jet lag was catching up), I had a great time.
24 May 2005 (Tuesday) Into the mountains
I woke early this morning—a consequence of jet-lag, rather than a planned wake-up. Nevertheless, after reading from about 4:00 AM until 6:00 AM, I began to organize my things, as Lexo and I had plans to go to the field today, to start our program with vultures.
Before I begin describing our day though, I should first let you know why I’ve made this trip. One of the biggest conservation problems that ornithologists are facing today is the decline of vulture populations in south Asia (see http://wildlifeconservation.org/wcm-featuredstories/feature-vulturesontheverge1/ for more details). This decline has caused researchers in the rest of Europe and Asia to become concerned about the conservation status of vulture populations in other places. Together with the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), the National Aviary is collaborating on a project to try to estimate the population size of vultures in several parts of Asia, including the Caucasus and in Kazakhstan (link to KAZ story), my other study site. Estimating population size is the first step towards understanding the trajectory of a population—whether its size is increasing, decreasing or stable. My trip to Georgia is designed for two things: first, to continue to build a collaborative relationship with GCCW and, second, to test out some methods for getting vultures to come to animal carcasses.
So our day starts as we leave Tbilisi early in the morning. On our way out of town we run a few errands—fill up the vehicle with gas, get some food, and get a dead sheep to use as bait for vultures. Eventually we get all that taken care of and we head out to Kazbegi Gorge. Kazbegi is a high mountain area with a few small villages and a a great deal of habitat that is important for grazing sheep in the summer. Of course if there are many sheep in the summer, there are also many dead sheep, and that means lots of food for vultures.
Kazbegi is a 2.5 hour ride from Tbilisi and we get up there just about 1:00 PM. We unload some bags at the house where we’ll be staying (the parents of a friend of Lexo’s) and we then head out into the field. We’ve received some great news when we get to the town of Kazbegi—Lexo has a friend who has called to say that he’s found a horse that died a few days ago, and that should be perfect bait for vultures too. So we go that afternoon out further up the gorge and drop the sheep in a great spot for attracting vultures and then pass by the horse. We move it just a bit so that it is in a better place for the birds and then we leave so that they have a chance to see the carcasses and get down to the business of feeding. Needless to say, in spite of our efforts, nothing comes to feed that day—a fairly typical result in some situations. It is often hard for us to know what makes a dead animal appealing to a vulture and even if we put out a perfect carcass, there may be an even better one in the next gorge over that we don’t know anything about.
One of the other highlights of the day was my interview with Georgian television. A TV crew was in the Kazbegi area, trying to get some footage of the endemic Caucasus black grouse. Since I was around, they asked me to speak a bit about the importance of the grouse and of the region, in terms of it’s biodiversity value. That was an interesting and exciting opportunity.
At the end of the day, we returned at about 8:30 PM to eat and head quickly to sleep. Long days in the field are tiring, especially for me, now that I‘ve been spending so much time in front of a computer and so little time actually doing field work!!
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