Animals in Georgia

Georgia is a small country of about 69,700 square kilometers, yet it holds a remarkable range of wild places for its size. About a third of its people live in Tbilisi, the capital, which leaves much of the country to farmland, high pasture and forest, and forest alone covers roughly 40 percent of the land. In a short journey you can go from the mild, wet Black Sea coast through green valleys to the ice and snow of the Greater Caucasus, then east to the dry steppe around Vashlovani. Each of these places gives animals a different home, and snow closes high passes such as Abano for much of the year, so summer is when the mountains open up.

The land has shaped life here for centuries, and people have long shared it with predators. Shepherds from Tusheti still drive their flocks each autumn from the mountains down to winter pastures near Vashlovani and return in spring. Protection also has deep roots: Lagodekhi, set aside in 1912, was the first nature reserve in what is now Georgia and still shelters deer on the slopes of the Caucasus. In 2021 the Colchic Rainforests and Wetlands became the first natural World Heritage Site in the country, safeguarding some of the oldest and most humid temperate forests on Earth. One of the best recent stories is in the southeast, where gazelles that vanished from Georgia in the 1990s were brought back from Azerbaijan and now number in the hundreds.

Tourism keeps growing, with a record 5.5 million tourist trips in 2025 and more than 730,000 foreign visits to protected areas that year. Many people head for the high peaks of Kazbegi, the forests of Borjomi Kharagauli and the coast at Batumi, where great numbers of birds of prey pass between the mountains and the sea each autumn. Wildlife follows these contrasts: bears, wolves and wild cats in the mountain forests, gazelles and vultures in the dry east, and dolphins off the Black Sea coast.

Georgia has several animals that can be dangerous, but the conflict people talk about most here involves livestock rather than visitors. Wolves are at the center of it. Researchers have described a considerable rise in reports of damage from wolf attacks in the regions they studied, including Kazbegi in the mountains and Lanchkhuti in the west, and residents of some villages have publicly asked the authorities for protection. The same research links part of the problem to poor livestock care and the loss of traditional knowledge among herders. Other scientists have looked at mating between wolves and sheepdogs, in a study of 102 wolves and 57 guarding dogs, and they suggest this could explain some bolder behavior, although that idea is still a hypothesis.

Bears are the other large predators that farmers and shepherds deal with, because they raid flocks in remote mountain pastures such as those in Tusheti. Farmers on the Iori Plateau, in the dry east, have asked for compensation or insurance for their losses to predators.

Wild boars can defend themselves with force when cornered, thanks to their weight and sharp tusks. Wild cats and hyenas are the least likely to cause trouble because they are so scarce and secretive, and hyenas are considered critically endangered in Georgia. We found no reliable national count of attacks on people, so the real number remains uncertain.

The animals people most want to see in Georgia are the large mammals of the mountain forests and the birds of prey above them. Borjomi Kharagauli National Park, in the middle of the country, is one of the best known places for this kind of wildlife, and the park lists bears, wolves, wild cats and deer among its main large animals. These animals are shy and live among thick forest, so most visitors find tracks or signs rather than a clear view, and camera traps have done much to show who lives there.

Deer are also a conservation story. Lagodekhi, on the slopes of the Caucasus in the east, counted about 1,400 in 1989 and about 70 ten years later, and numbers had climbed back to about 300 by 2015. Near Tbilisi, a breeding program at Algeti National Park received its first deer in 2025.

The dry east is a different world. Hyenas survive on the Iori Plateau, the Shiraki and Eldari steppes and in Vashlovani National Park, though they are very rare. Birds are often easier to spot. Vultures and eagles soar over high valleys such as Kazbegi, and from mid August to mid October the coast near Batumi fills with migrating eagles, falcons and other birds of prey, in one of the most important migration corridors in the region.