Zeleni krvotok Hrvatske (Rijeke Hrvatske) - dokumentarni film

Everybody knows about the beauty of Adriatic sea,

clean and transparent sea,

rocky beaches with ancient towns of stone.

The sea, however, is not the only wealth of Croatia.

Rivers are the biggest values.

Slow and murky panonian rivers are showing their power with floods.

Short rapids of mountain rivers are intensely jumping over foaming rocks,

while Karlovac karst rivers graciously interflow over waterfalls made of tufa

into the greenery of slow river flow.

Lika rivers are curving through karst fields like a snake and disappear into the darkness of the underground.

Adriatic rivers are giving oneself up to the sea in the beauty of their estuary

or are blending with the sea inarming it with their specious delta.

So diverse and so preserved like maybe nowhere else in Europe,

rivers of Croatia still freely flow .

In the very north of Croatia, trough cultivated plain flows the Drava river.

With its flow, Drava is forming here natural border with Hungary.

While lowland rivers in the Europe are mostly destroyed with dams and regulations,

Drava in Croatia is still mostly preserved from this deadly chains.

She had carried rocks from the Alps,

crumbling them in her foaming womb and leaving them behind in the form of sand or gravel.

Without mercy, the river takes the river bank but giving what she took and depositing the gravel and sand bars.

Mura-Drava confluence changed its location several times in the last hundred years.

The river is here free to choose its own way and to make a border for herself.

These scenes look like Apocalypse but are in fact scenes of birth.

The Drava has here enough space to create new and incessantly renewed old habits:

sandbars, steep banks, sidearms, dead-arms, and forest.

This is the key to its biodiversity.

When the water is low, sandbars rise up from the river,

looking like a lifeless deposit of sediment.

Many birds come to the sandbars to feed with alluvion that river ejected.

Little ringed plover seems to be emerging from the gravel on the sandbar that is still not overgrown.

After mating female is now laying on the eggs.

She has just a little dig away the pebbles

and laid down the eggs among them.

Her eggs can be hard to differentiate from the pebbles so this will make them safer from potential predators.