☢️ Forty years after the disaster, Chernobyl teems with wildlife

• Forty years after the accident at the nuclear power plant, the area around Chernobyl remains too dangerous for human habitation. But the wildlife has moved back in.
• Przewalski's horses, wolves, bears, lynx, moose, and red deer roam freely in the Chernobyl zone.
• Despite lingering radiation, wildlife populations have grown.

Nature has taken over

Forty years after the accident at the nuclear power plant on April 26, 1986, the area around Chernobyl remains too dangerous for human habitation. But the wildlife has moved back in. Wolves roam the vast no-man's-land spanning Ukraine and Belarus, and brown bears have returned after more than a century's absence. Populations of lynx, moose, and red deer have grown, and free-roaming packs of dogs have also established themselves.

On the contaminated land graze Przewalski's horses, a stocky, sand-colored horse species originally from Mongolia. There they are called "takhi," meaning "spirit." The species differs from domestic horses in having 33 pairs of chromosomes instead of 32.

A successful reintroduction

Przewalski's horses were declared extinct in the wild in 1969 and survived only through captive breeding. In 1998, they were released into the Chernobyl zone as an experiment. Many died after the introduction, but others adapted. Today there is a global population of around 3,000 individuals, according to Florian Drouard, operations manager at a program for the horses at Cevennes National Park in southern France.

Denys Vyshnevskyi, the zone's lead nature scientist, describes Ukraine now having a free-ranging population as something of a small miracle. The horses live in small social groups, typically one stallion with several mares and their young, alongside separate bands of younger males.

Hidden cameras show that the horses have adapted in unexpected ways. They seek shelter in crumbling barns and abandoned houses to escape harsh weather and insects, and even bed down inside the buildings. The species is originally adapted to open landscapes but now also thrives in Ukraine's partly forested environment.

The landscape transforms

In parts of the zone, nature now resembles European landscapes from several centuries past. Trees pierce abandoned buildings, roads dissolve into forest, and weathered Soviet-era signs stand beside leaning wooden crosses in overgrown cemeteries.

To track the animals, Vyshnevskyi often drives alone for hours, setting up motion-sensitive camera traps in camouflaged casings on trees. Despite the lingering radiation, wildlife populations have grown. Researchers have recorded some subtle effects — some frogs have developed darker skin, and birds in areas with higher radiation more often develop cataracts.

Vyshnevskyi notes that the land was previously used intensively for agriculture, cities, and infrastructure, but that nature has effectively performed a factory reset.

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