Down an overgrown country road, three startled wild horses with rugged coats and rigid manes dart into the flourishing overgrowth of their unlikely nature reserve: the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.
Thirty-five years after the world’s worst nuclear disaster — an anniversary commemorated in the former Soviet country on Monday next week — surging flora and fauna have taken over deserted residential blocks, shops and official buildings topped with communist icons.
Ukrainian authorities say that the area might not be fit for humans for 24,000 years, but for now, this breed of wild horse has thrived.
Photo: Reuters
“It’s really a symbol of the reserve and even the exclusion zone in general,” said Denys Vyshnevsky, an official at the Chernobyl Radiation and Ecological Biosphere Reserve.
The explosion in the fourth reactor at the nuclear power plant on April 26, 1986, left swathes of Ukraine and neighboring Belarus badly contaminated, and led to the creation of a no-man’s-land within a 30km radius of the station.
Dozens of villages and towns were evacuated, turning the area into a giant reserve unprecedented in Europe by its size.
More than three decades after the incident, there has been an influx of visitors to the area, spurring authorities to seek official status — and protection — from UNESCO.
Since the disaster, the area has become a haven for elk, wolves — and the stocky, endangered breed of wild horse native to Asia, Przewalski’s horse.
The breed, named after Russian scientist Nikolai Przewalski, who discovered it in the Gobi Desert, became all but extinct by the middle of the 20th century, partially due to overhunting.
It was reintroduced by scientists to areas of Mongolia, China and Russia as part of preservation efforts.
In a different program, 30 of the horses in 1998 were released into the Chernobyl zone, replacing an extinct horse native to the region.
The experiment was soon halted, but the horses remained and now number about 150 in the exclusion zone, with another 60 over the border in Belarus.
“Paradoxically, this is a unique opportunity to preserve biodiversity,” Vyshnevsky said.
Under the right conditions, the Ukrainian herd could eventually increase to 300 or even 500 animals, said Sergiy Zhyla, a researcher at the reserve.
Researchers at Prague Zoo participating in the conservation efforts say that the global population of Przewalski’s horses has grown to 2,700.
Following the success in Chernobyl, there is discussion over introducing other endangered species, such as the European bison.
“We’ll be able to recreate the landscape that was here before humans began intensely exploiting the region,” he said.
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