LAMBING IN WINTER PASTURE OF VASHLOVANI NATIONAL PARK

If you want to experience something authentic this is the tour for you! See baby lambs take their first steps - Meet the new borns in the winter pasture of Vashlovani National Park! Lambing season is something really special and touching that you can experience ever. From the begging of March is a time for new life and witnesses lambing in Vashlovani. This tour is a good opportunity to visit Tush shepherds in Vashlovani National Park, where our ewes and lambs are housed until spring, before they start migrating to the summer pastures to Tusheti. Our resident shepherds will guide you through the barns and lambing process, providing you with a fantastic insight into this special time of year.

 Vashlovani Protected Areas have long been used as winter pastures, which are of great importance for the population of the Eastern Georgian regions, where livestock breeding is a traditional sector of economy, particularly for the population of Tusheti. Because of their geographical position and climate, the VPAs and the adjacent Shiraki and Eldari Valleys represent a zone of semideserts with insignificant amount of precipitation (and rarely as snow) in winters. Thanks to it, the Tusheti population has used these areas as winter pastures for ages. 

In the Soviet times too, areas for winter pastures used to be allocated to the state and collective farms of the Akhmeta district, where mass livestock wintering was practiced. The origin of the nearby village Kasristskali in the middle of the twentieth century is associated with these pastures. 

Correspondingly, it is the continuation of the tradition that the livestock farmers of almost the whole Kakheti region still practice to winter their stock on said areas. A part of livestock farms (up to 45) is directly located within the Protected Areas, while another part (32 farms) is located within the adjacent 2-km zone. 

It should be mentioned that the absolute majority of the mentioned farms were built in the Soviet times; at that time collective and state farms were more actively engaged in livestock breeding and the infrastructure of farms correspondingly figured on all the branches of livestock breeding. Therefore, notwithstanding the currently developed livestock breeding sector (mainly sheep breeding], the major part of those engaged in the sector has a privatized farm/lodgings

Vashlovani Protected Areas

Vashlovani Protected Areas are located in Kakheti Region, in the extreme south-eastern part of Georgia, in its historic territory - Kizikhi, at a 50 km distance from the Dedoplistskaro regional center, and 180 km from Tbilisi
Geographically, Vashlovani Protected Areas are located between the two main rivers of Kakheti – Alazani and Iori, which represent concurrently a line of state demarcation with the Republic of Azerbaijan. The total area occupied by VPAs makes 25,114 ha, the average altitude above sea level varying within 300–600 m.

The Vashlovani Area is notable for its unique biodiversity; light forests, submontane deserts and Alazani floodplains, steppes and shrubs alternate each other within a small territory.

A great number of juniper and Caucasian hackberry (Celtis caucasica) trees also deserves mentioning, although the most unique for Vashlovani are the wild pistachio trees of rare species (Pistacia mutica) which abound here; the view of scattered, rounded pistachio tree crowns gives the impression of an apple garden; it is probably the reason why these places are called Vashlovani („apple orchard valley‟ in Georgian).

In addition to flora, there are many rare representatives of fauna in Vashlovani, which are now critically endangered. The VPAs have every means to preserve and further propagate rare animal species and birds existing in the area
Local livelihood assessment of Tush Shepherds traditionally using territory of Vashlovani Protected Areas for winter pastures