Animals Rule Chernobyl 30 Years After Nuclear Disaster

Marina Shkvyria watches for animal tracks as she walks toward an abandoned village in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, the area sealed to the public after a nuclear power plant exploded here 30 years ago, on April 26, 1986. Spotting one, she crouches and runs her finger over the toes of a wolf print in the loose sand.

It may seem strange that Chernobyl, an area known for the deadliest nuclear accident in history, could become a refuge for all kinds of animals—from moose, deer, beaver, and owls to more exotic species like brown bear, lynx, and wolves—but that is exactly what Shkvyria and some other scientists think has happened. Without people hunting them or ruining their habitat, the thinking goes, wildlife is thriving despite high radiation levels.

Shkvyria is a wolf expert at the Ukraine’s National Academy of Sciences, and one of a handful of scientists following the fate of Chernobyl’s wildlife. She discovered the wolf pack near the village using unorthodox, but cheap, methods. “We came down here late last spring and howled, and the young wolf pups howled back from the top of that hill,” she says with a mischievous smile.So far, scientists are divided on how well the animals are really doing in the exclusion zone, which straddles Ukraine and Belarus, says biologist Jim Beasley of the University of Georgia’s Savannah River Ecology Laboratory, who has been studying wolves there with grant support from the National .

backing up the camera traps, Shkvyria has gone into the old Soviet archives, stacks of paper reports shelved in the National Academy of Sciences. What she found agrees with Gaschak’s research, and tempers international excitement over a population boom in the zone.

We looked through official state censuses of all hunted species, and it was interesting for us to not see a really big difference between the 1960s, 1980s, 1990s, and today. It was a stable structure—40, 50, 60 wolves, not more” on the Ukrainian side, she says. “Illegal hunting still influences it, so it’s a dynamic system, but it’s more or less stable.Indeed, the people living on the edge of the zone, even the poachers, are a good barometer to anecdotally measure increases in the number of wildlife, since animals do not need a pass to enter or leave the zone, as one villager put it.

There are more animals now than there were 30 years ago. We have horse, deer, moose, wolves, boar, hare and others,” says Anatoly Tsiganenko, standing in the warm afternoon sun next to his neighbor’s oily motorcycle repair garage in the village of Radcha, just a mile from the border with Belarus and a few hundred yards from the edge of the exclusion zone. Last fall, he says, he saw a wolf walking through his neck of the village. He guesses it was around 140 pounds and stood well above his knees.