Sergey Gaschak

After a fatal series of errors and malfunctions in the early morning of April 26, 1986, the core of the Chernobyl nuclear facility melted down and then exploded, killing 31 workers at the plant. The accident spewed massive amounts of radioactive material into the surrounding area, forcing a mass evacuation of the nearby villages. Many wild animals died from the direct toxicity of the radiation and almost 1,000 acres of the Red Forest—named for the unusual color its trees turned after the disaster—died within months. The most radioactive human settlements were bulldozed and buried. (See the related story about the most radioactive part of the nuclear plant: “Chernobyl’s Hot Mess, ‘the Elephant’s Foot,’ Is Still Lethal.”)

Checkpoints and fences were quickly put up around the vast contaminated region, stretching between northern Ukraine and southern Belarus. This became the exclusion zone, a region that has remained closed to most human activity for the past 28 years. Yet the area is far from a barren wasteland. Instead it is a patchwork of “hot zones” of high radiation next to “clean” areas. Many of the most radioactive isotopes have decayed or washed out of the region in rain. Birds, rodents, elk, lynxes, wolves, wild boar, and deer have all been spotted living within the borders of the zone. A herd of 21 rare Przewalski’s horses that had escaped from the quarantined area were found to be living in the region. By early 2005, the herd had grown to 64.

Many of these Chernobyl animals have been found to have high levels of radiation in their bodies, but none of them appear to have mutated into monsters with abnormal numbers of heads (although in the early years, researchers did find plants and mushrooms that were severely mutated, gigantic, malformed, or even glowing). Does the absence of obvious deformities mean that the animals are thriving? Might the habitats around Chernobyl actually be better off after the disaster?

“It can be said that the world’s worst nuclear power plant disaster is not as destructive to wildlife populations as are normal human activities.”

Though substantial doses of radiation would not be expected to help wildlife, the accident also had another profound effect: It pushed out the people living nearby. Prior to 1986, few animals were able to inhabit the region around the power plant because Soviet dairy farms and pine plantations had impinged heavily on their habitats. “This region was affected by people over a number of centuries,” explains Sergey Gaschak, a researcher at the Chernobyl Center in Ukraine, who has been photographing wildlife in exclusion zone since the early 2000s. “It was very transformed by irrigation, artificial forests, arable lands, infrastructure, [and] garbage.” In the years following the accident, it appears that animals reclaimed the land, and were spotted regularly by researchers working in the area. “Definitely the wildlife are happy in the absence of humans,” says Gaschak, “[And] externally, the animals appear normal.” His photographs have documented a great number of large mammals such as lynxes and wolves. Because wolves are at the top of the food chain, they are usually regarded as positive signs of the overall health of the ecosystem.

