The combined territory of the exclusion zones in Ukraine and Belarus caused by the Chernobyl disaster is a little more than 1,600 square miles, making it one of the largest truly wild sanctuaries in Europe.īut what it means for animals to be rebounding in Chernobyl has become the scientific equivalent of a boxing match, with the latest blow delivered Monday when Beasley put forward a study in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. “The beaver in Ukraine is exactly like the elephant in Africa: it completely changes the look of the landscape.” Debate Continues “It will become like it was a hundred years ago.” Eventually, as the beavers fell trees, the land will return to bogs. Beavers can return it to being a little bit more wild,” she says. “Literally three weeks ago that tree was still standing,” Shkvyria says, pointing to the pale chips. Felled birches, some three feet around, lay across the water, up and down the length of the ditch.
The bright chips of a freshly chewed birch still lay at the base of a tree. On the opposite end of the village, a perfectly straight Soviet canal still drained the low-lying land. Here the earth had been torn up by a sounder of foraging boars. After placing the camera trap on the trunk of a pine, Shkvyria, Burdo, and I walk along a path, eventually entering a village of rotting wooden cottages slowly being swallowed up by scrubby pines, birches, and willows. The growth of their populations in recent years may be one of the most important things to happen in the zone’s ecology. We also saw the handiwork of beavers-everywhere. They charged toward us across a large shaggy field, their brush-like black manes standing straight up from taupe bodies, and took a long look at us as disused power lines swayed in the distance. In a herd of wild Przewalski's horses, a rare and endangered subspecies of wild horse introduced to the preserve, I counted an adult male, two adult females, and two juveniles. I counted scores of birds: ravens, songbirds, three kinds of birds of prey, and dozens of swans paddling in the radioactive cooling pond. Walking along sandy firebreaks used as forest highways with Shkvyria and her colleague, vole specialist Olena Burdo, we found the tracks of wolf, moose, deer, badger, and horses. Even in the busy area between the main guard post and the remains of the Chernobyl power plant, signs of wildlife were everywhere. So when I visited in early April, I made a point of counting every animal I saw. While researching this story, one biologist who studies Chernobyl told me I would not see any roadkill in the exclusion zone-and would be lucky to hear any birds or see any animals. Radiation, he argues in the study, is not holding back Chernobyl wildlife populations. (See a video about wolves taking back Chernobyl.) You can’t go anywhere without seeing wolves,” he says. Camera traps captured images of a bison, 21 boars, nine badgers, 26 gray wolves, 60 raccoon dogs (an Asian species also called a tanuki), and 10 red foxes. He was shocked by the number of animals he saw there in a five-week survey. In a new study released Monday, Beasley says that the population of large mammals on the Belarus side has increased since the disaster.
So far, scientists are divided on how well the animals are really doing in the exclusion zone, which straddles Ukraine and Belarus, says biologist Jim Beasley of the University of Georgia’s Savannah River Ecology Laboratory, who has been studying wolves there with grant support from the National Geographic Society Committee for Research and Exploration. WATCH: The absence of humans in Chernobyl's exclusion zone has created an opportunity for abundant populations of gray wolves, and other animals. “We came down here late last spring and howled, and the young wolf pups howled back from the top of that hill,” she says with a mischievous smile. She discovered the wolf pack near the village using unorthodox, but cheap, methods. Shkvyria is a wolf expert at the Ukraine’s National Academy of Sciences, and one of a handful of scientists following the fate of Chernobyl’s wildlife. Without people hunting them or ruining their habitat, the thinking goes, wildlife is thriving despite high radiation levels. It may seem strange that Chernobyl, an area known for the deadliest nuclear accident in history, could become a refuge for all kinds of animals-from moose, deer, beaver, and owls to more exotic species like brown bear, lynx, and wolves-but that is exactly what Shkvyria and some other scientists think has happened.
Spotting one, she crouches and runs her finger over the toes of a wolf print in the loose sand. Chernobyl, UkraineMarina Shkvyria watches for animal tracks as she walks toward an abandoned village in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, the area sealed to the public after a nuclear power plant exploded here 30 years ago, on April 26, 1986.
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