Three wild horses throw themselves into the lush greenery of their nature reserve: the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.
He is about to end up run over, his mother saves himAlong a country road, three frightened wild horses throw themselves into the lush greenery of their truly sui generis nature reserve: the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. Here, 35 years after the world's worst nuclear disaster, the growing flora and fauna have taken over the buildings of yore. But the landscape continues to be surreal.
Ukrainian authorities say the area may not be suitable for humans for the next 24 years. And so, after the abandoned cows, this breed of wild horses is also thriving to say the least.
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“It's really a symbol of the reserve and also of the exclusion zone in general,” says Denys Vyshnevsky, head of the science department of the Chernobyl nature reserve created in the area five years ago.
The explosion in the fourth reactor of the nuclear power plant on April 26, 1986 left entire areas of Ukraine and neighboring Belarus severely contaminated and led to the creation of a "no man's land" within a radius of 30 km from the base.
Dozens of villages and towns were evacuated, later turning the area into a gigantic reserve unprecedented in Europe for its size.
After the disaster, the area has become a refuge for moose, wolves and the endangered breed of wild horses native to Asia, Przewalski's horse. Extinct in the mid-XNUMXth century, partly due to overhunting, Przewalski's horse was reintroduced by scientists to areas of Mongolia, China and Russia.
#Preserve_5 # 35_ChernobylCHREBZ - a place where nature can be itself. The biodiversity of the Reserve is impressive.
Posted by Chornobyl Radiation and Ecological Biosphere Reserve on Wednesday, April 21, 2021
And, in a similar program, 30 of the horses were released in the Chernobyl area in 1998, replacing an extinct horse native to the region, the Tarpan.
The experiment in Ukraine was soon stopped, but horses remained and are now around 150 in parts of the exclusion zone, with around 60 more across the border in Belarus.
"Paradoxically, this is a unique opportunity to preserve biodiversity," Vyshnevsky said. Under the right conditions, the Ukrainian herd could eventually grow to 300 or even 500, ”concluded Sergiy Zhyla, researcher at the Chernobyl Biosphere Reserve.
Source: PHYS
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- Wheat from Chernobyl is still contaminated, even what grows outside the exclusion zone
