11 Mar Chernobyl wildlife sanctuary

When Henry Shukman, a writer for Outsideonline.com, visited the 30 km exclusion zone around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster, here’s what he found:

The wild boar is standing 30 or 40 yards away, at the bottom of a grassy bank, staring right at me. Even from this distance I can see its outrageously long snout, its giant pointed ears, and the spiny bristles along its back. It looks part porcupine, a number of shades of ocher and gray. And it’s far bigger than I expected, maybe chest-high to a man. The boar is like some minor forest god straight from the wilderness, gazing wild-eyed at the strange spectacle of a human being. For a moment it seems to consider charging me, then thinks better of it. When it trots away, it moves powerfully, smoothly, on spindly, graceful legs twice as long as a pig’s, and vanishes into the trees.

Keep people out of an area, and wildlife moves in.

It would be eerie were it not so lovely. The abandoned backstreets of Chernobyl are so overgrown, you can hardly see it’s a town. They’ve turned into dark-green tunnels buzzing with bees, filled with an orchestral score of birdsong, the lanes so narrow that the van pushes aside weeds on both sides as it creeps down them, passing house after house enshrined in forest. Red admirals, peacock butterflies, and some velvety brown lepidoptera are fluttering all over the vegetation. It looks like something out of an old Russian fairy tale….

Frogs plop into the water, boatmen skedaddle across the surface, dragonflies hover—it’s like a weight has been lifted from the world. A sparrowhawk turns in lazy circles; a pair of ducks race by, low down, necks stretched, and make it to a willow on the far bank with a clatter of relief.

I experienced the same thing working on the Sydney Tar Ponds from 2001 to 2006. Until cleanup efforts moved into high gear last winter, a fence kept people at bay, with the unintended consequence of creating a refuge for wildlife. This had a delightfully confounding effect on visitors. Media reports and environmentalist hyperbole had led most newcomers to expect a roiling cauldron of bubbling tar. Instead, they found a water body teeming with wildlife: foxes, feral cats, raptors, water fowl, shorebirds, and a dozen fish species. Lush wildflowers blanketed the edge of the pond, nourished by a continuous flow of raw sewage until the Battery Point treatment plant went into service.

Sporadic studies failed to turn up much in the way of chemically induced injury to wild animals in the Tar Ponds Exclosure. Not so in Chernobyl:

On the surface, Igor says, the wildlife seems to be thriving, but under the fur and hide, the DNA of most species has become unstable. They’ve eaten a lot of food contaminated with cesium and strontium. Even though the animals look fine, there are differences at the chromosomal level in every generation, as yet mostly invisible. But some have started to show: there are bird populations with freakishly high levels of albinism, with 20 percent higher levels of asymmetry in their feathers, and higher cancer rates. There are strains of mice with resistance to radioactivity—meaning they’ve developed heritable systems to repair damaged cells. Covered in radioactive particles after the disaster, one large pine forest turned from green to red: seedlings from this Red Forest placed in their own plantation have grown up with various genetic abnormalities. They have unusually long needles, and some grow not as trees but as bushes. The same has happened with some birch trees, which have grown in the shape of large, bushy feathers, without a recognizable trunk at all.

Photo credit: S. Gaschak. H/T: Arts and Letters Daily.