What the mountains between two seas hide — the Black Sea and the Caspian

From the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea to the western shore of the Black Sea — less than a thousand kilometers. And within that distance, everything fits: semi-desert and beech thickets, rhododendron groves and alpine meadows, rocky tundra and a subtropical coast where palms grow alongside boxwood. One region — containing everything that on the plains would be scattered across thousands of kilometers. This is the Caucasus.

The Great Ridge stretches eleven hundred kilometers from the Black Sea to the Caspian. By geological standards it is young — it rose some twenty-five million years ago and is still growing. That was enough for every fourth plant here to become unique, found nowhere else. The Caucasus is an island of evolution in the middle of a continent, one of the twenty-five principal biological hotspots on the planet.

This film is about western beech forests where three people cannot reach around a single trunk. About the Colchic relict that survived the ice age and was destroyed in a few years by a single accidentally introduced moth. About the Elbrus glaciers retreating hundreds of meters over a century. About the return of the European bison and the Persian leopard. About the bearded vulture that feeds on bones, about the snow leopard thought to be gone, and about the Caucasian black grouse that has nowhere left to climb.

ТАЙМ-КОДЫ:
00:00 — Between two seas
05:30 — Young mountains and endemism
13:00 — Western Caucasus: beech forests and the return of the European bison
21:00 — Colchic forest and the death of the boxwood
28:00 — Rhododendron, tur, chamois, leopard
36:00 — Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan
46:00 — Lesser Caucasus and the bezoar ibex
52:00 — Elbrus and altitudinal zonation
58:00 — Alpine meadows, snow leopard, bear
1:08:00 — Black Sea and Caspian Sea
1:18:00 — Bearded vulture, griffon vulture, Egyptian vulture
1:24:00 — Nature reserves and transboundary nature
1:30:00 — Nature despite everything

Tell us in the comments: is it worth spending so much effort and resources to bring back into the wild species that we ourselves erased — such as the Persian leopard and the Caucasian bison?

#CaucasusNature #documentaryfilm #wildlife #Elbrus #CaucasusBiosphere

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