If you want to encourage true diversity in wildlife, all you have to do is get rid of the people. We keep setting aside land for wildlife preserves, yet those areas are thick with people anyway- tourists who want to see wildlife, and who help pay for its upkeep. But in an area where people cannot go at all, nature truly takes over. When the Chernobyl nuclear plant melted down and exploded in 1986, the radiation cloud drifted north into what is now Belarus. Thousands of people were evacuated from villages and farms, and they never returned. While the Ukrainians have opened the region around Chernobyl for scientific study, the Polesie State Radioecological Reserve (PSRR) in Belarus is still off limits.
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Without people around, the animals moved in. Boars, hares, beavers, deer, and more found freedom and relative safety in the PSRR. They don’t know about radiation. And those prey animals were followed by predators. Wolves and lynx have moved in to take advantage of the deer and other wildlife. Even brown bears come through in the summer. These predators that normally hide in the woods are living in abandoned homes and farms, and stalking deer who graze in grasslands that used to be agricultural fields. We in the west are only now finding out about these animals reclaiming the land because of translation lag and the political fortunes of Belarus and other former Soviet nations. Read what we know of the diversity of wildlife in the PSRR at Atlas Obscura.
(Image credit: Jon Glittenberg)
Source: neatorama