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WITNESS: Wildlife and radiation in evacuated Chernobyl zone
Wed Mar 4, 2009 10:53pm EST
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(Vasily Fedosenko is a Reuters photographer based in the Belarussian capital, Minsk. Born in 1960 in the provincial town of Bobruisk, he initially trained as an engineer but late in the Soviet era started taking on jobs as photo correspondent with Belarussian newspapers and began working for Reuters in 1997. His assignments include Russia, Ukraine and Georgia as well as Afghanistan, Liberia and Poland. In the following story, he recounts one of his regular tours of the nature reserve that has grown up in the forest area contaminated by the Chernobyl nuclear reactor explosion.)
By Vasily Fedosenko
BABCHIN, Belarus (Reuters) - We venture out at dawn from a dilapidated shack nestled in a forest to see the animals, although rising early is not always necessary.
Still inhospitable to humans, the Chernobyl "exclusion zone" -- a contaminated 30-km radius around the site of the nuclear reactor explosion of April 26, 1986 -- is now a nature reserve and teems with wolves, moose, bison, wild boars and bears.
Boars, which generally confine their sorties to dusk, plunder what remains of gardens in the daytime, strolling down empty village streets, wandering into farms and settlements in search of food.
Moose also venture out -- like the cow and her two young which appear on the roadside to munch on low-hanging branches.
"Moose are very curious creatures," says Grigory Sys, one of the naturalists who oversee the animals in the still-radioactive forest. "They'll want to have a good look at us for a couple of minutes before heading off into the forest."
Since I met him about four years ago I've accompanied Sys a half-dozen times round the 2,162 square km (865-sq. mile) zone, emptied of people by the fire and explosion at the plant just over the border in Ukraine.
Belarus, downwind from the blast, was the country worst affected by the world's worst civil nuclear accident. A quarter of its territory was contaminated and villages deserted on both sides of the border between what were then Soviet republics.
The human hardship is untold: dozens died putting out the blaze, there were mass evacuations of tens of thousands of people -- some twice as the authorities underestimated the extent of radiation -- thousands developed thyroid cancer.
But it was undeniably a good thing for wildlife.
"You'll see -- they run off a bit, but will then stop," Sys says of the moose.
Touring the zone with Sys means spending several nights in a forest shack, with few comforts beyond three simple cots and a stove.
We take my car through the zone's abandoned villages. Houses, personal possessions, shops, even amenities like amusement parks, are left untouched from late in the Soviet era.
WOLVES RULE
Sys says the wolves, now numbering 300, are in charge. Continued...
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