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| Chernobyl Wildlife - Moose |
What do you do when an area is so irradiated, toxic, and polluted that no human should ever live there?
Why turn it into a wildlife park, of course!
Prior to 1986, the area surrounding Chernobyl in the Ukraine was an agricultural area populated by about 135,000 people.
After an uncontained nuclear power plant accident, however, livestock and crops across a vast area were systematically destroyed, and all of the people within a 2,800 square mile area around the nuclear plant were evacuated.
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| Chernobyl Wildlife - Przewalski's Horse |
With the removal of humans has come the return of some of Europe's most endangered species, including moose, bison, lynx, wolves, cranes, beaver, eagles, hawks, wild boar, roe deer, badger, and otters. Populations of human-dependent animals, such as rats, house mice, sparrows and pigeons, have declined.
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| Chernobyl Wildlife - European Wild Boar |
While some folks may imagine that the Chernobyl site must be filled with two-headed frogs, radioactive fish, and sterile deer, scientists have found relatively few visible wildlife side-effects. Dr. Ron Chesser, a senior research scientist and genetics professor at the University of Georgia's Savannah River Ecology Laboratory (SREL) in Aiken, South Carolina notes that:
"There are no monsters. The Chernobyl zone is actually a very beautiful place with thriving wildlife communities. Without a Geiger-counter, you wouldn't know you were in a highly contaminated place."
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| Chernobyl Wildlife - European Wolf |
So what will happen now with the heavily irradiated area around the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant in Japan? No one knows, but one option is to declare it an off-limit zone -- and turn it into a wildlife refuge of considerable size.
For a similar course of events here in the U.S. see the 586-square mile Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State, and the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons facility and Rocky Mountain Arsenal outside of Denver which are now National Wildlife Refuge's.
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| Chernobyl Wildlife - European Bison . |
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| Chernobyl Wildlife - Owl with old nuclear reactor in background . |
3 comments:
LOVE, Love this..such a terrific bit of small news out of such a disaster..What ARE you finding on the efforts of animal rescue in Japan?
The coverage is amazing. And horrifying. Am not sure I want to know about little old ladies escaping on bikes...contrasted with the horrors of the chained dogs, the horses wandering aimlessly, the horror of the shelters, the cold, the death... The bloggers, 'cept for a few are offering up "we need some "sweetness and light"' BS. GAG
thanks PB..you are helping me get through this thing we call life. Jane and the Pack at Oatlands, where we recently lost a true "ole timer" BJ Mahoney.
Man, the boar, the owl and the wolf all look a little freaky. The head on that wolf reminds me a bit of the Tasmanian Wolf. Just something a bit "off", foreign to my eye.
The owl is a just-fledging juvenile that must have tumbled out of a nearby nest, which is why he looks bit odd, and was available to pose.
Eastern European (Eurasian) wolves look a lot like American coyotes with long heads and thin bodies, and tend to live as solitary animals like coyotes, rather than pack up like our wolves do. Their size is extremely variable, but it is not uncommon for young females, like this one, to be only 10 pounds or or so larger than an eastern coyote (i.e. 60 pounds or so). They are certainly different looking than what we have in Wyoming and Montana!
P
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