How one animal has found a home in the unlikeliest of places: Chernobyl
Lesson summary
Hello again, and welcome to Lesson number 263 of Plain English. I’m Jeff, JR is the producer, and you can find this full lesson at PlainEnglish.com/263.
Coming up today: the land surrounding Chernobyl in modern-day Ukraine, the site of the deadliest nuclear accident in history, is home to the last truly wild horse species – and they are thriving there. The expression today is “fend for yourself” and we have a song of the week.
Quick housekeeping note before we start: if you visit the web site this weekend, you might find that it’s down for maintenance. As you know, we are getting ready to transition to a new web site on Monday, so there might be a little interruption while we get everything ready this weekend. If you find the site is down, check back in a few hours.
Wild horses thrive in Chernobyl ‘exclusion zone’
The worst nuclear accident of all time happened in 1986, when a reactor inside a nuclear power plant exploded in Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union. The location, Chernobyl, will forever be associated with the terrible damage that modern science can inflict on the world, if not properly controlled. The accident permanently scarred part of the earth in a way that no other man-made event ever has.
After the accident, over one hundred thousand residents of the immediate area had to permanently leave their homes due to radiation from the explosion. Scientists believed that the land surrounding Chernobyl would be uninhabitable for twenty thousand years; a land area extending 30 miles in each direction from the plant has been designated an “exclusion zone,” where nobody is allowed to live. A small number of workers still commute into the area to decommission the plant. The area has otherwise been turned back over to nature.
That’s where it gets interesting. This area so badly damaged by humans has been reclaimed by forest and wildlife. The so-called “red forest” has become a popular stomping grounds and safe haven for many animals, and it has helped revive one species in particular from near extinction. That would be the only surviving sub-species of wild horse, called the Przewalski horse, named after the Russian explorer Nikolai Przewalski (Psuh-vahl-skeez).
What is a wild horse, anyway? At first, I thought a wild horse was just a horse that roams freely in the wild. It turns out that that’s not the case. Humans began domesticating horses in the year 4000 BC, and almost all horses on Earth today are descendants of those domesticated horses, even if they are now running wild. There are tens of thousands of horses that roam freely in the wild. But Przewalski’s horses are nature’s only connection to horses that have never been domesticated: they are the last truly wild horses. That’s why scientists are trying to protect them as best they can.
Przewalski’s horses also look a bit different than most domesticated horses. They have a stocky build with shorter legs, and shorter hair on their tails. They also have two more chromosomes than other horse species.
Overgrazing and poaching caused the decline of the wild Przewalski’s horses. By the 1950s, only twelve remained in European zoos, and the last wild horse outside captivity was seen in the Gobi Desert in 1969. Conservationists began a captive breeding program for the remaining horses as a last-ditch effort to save the species. In a captive breeding program, scientists breed endangered species in zoos in order to rebuild the population. Once enough new animals have been born, they can be carefully reintroduced into the wild.
In 1998, a team of scientists saw a golden opportunity, and they introduced 31 Przewalski’s horses into the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, which is the 4,700 square kilometer area surrounding the site of the disaster. The area provided a unique, test-tube environment to reintroduce the horses to the wild – a place free from human civilization, but potentially at the cost of exposure to high levels of harmful radiation.
The original horses were transported from nature reserves and zoos. Up until that point, they had lived their whole lives with human help and protection; they had never had to fend for themselves in the wild. As expected, many horses died during the transfer and release process, but the surviving population was still able to grow.
Motion-sensing cameras show that the horses have taken advantage of their new surroundings. They are using abandoned structures, like barns, as shelters. Without humans around, all the abandoned manmade structures are fair game for wildlife to use. They’re coming in handy for scientists, too. Scientists put cameras inside the structures to keep tabs on the horses’ vital stats like age, sex ratio, population size, and genetic structure. The most recent count in 2018 showed that the population had grown to 150. There are many more in other parts of Europe and Asia, too.
Przewalski’s horses aren’t the only creatures thriving in the Exclusion Zone. Growing populations of moose, deer, beaver, owl, bear, and wolf all roam the famous “red forest” alongside the horses.
New memberships at PlainEnglish.com
We’re getting close! Monday is the release of the new web site. So I have just one last message for you before it goes live and that is about the membership types you’ll find.
First up, we are going to be introducing a free membership tier on the site. If you sign up for a free membership, you’ll get access to the lesson libraries, which will help you explore our whole 260-plus lesson history. You will also have access to courses and challenges; this is a new feature. We will start you off with a special writing challenge and we’ll add a new course or challenge every few months. You’ll also get access to a special home page, with all the latest lessons on it.
That’s the free membership, and it will always be free. Next up, we have a new membership tier called the Starter membership. The big highlight of the Starter membership is going to be the translations in our transcripts. For those of you who don’t know, our transcripts include translations of about 100 words and phrases from each lesson into seven languages. And they’re so great because you just hover your mouse over those words as you read, and it shows you the translation right away. That is our most popular feature. Right now, it’s included in Plain English Plus+, but we are creating a new, lower-priced membership that includes these translations and five flash cards in each lesson. This is a great membership if you’re just building your vocabulary. And it’s going to be just $7 per month. I really wanted to find a way to offer our most popular feature at a lower price, so you can get our famous translations at a lower price of just $7 per month with the Starter membership.
And then of course we have Plain English Plus+, which will include the translations, but also the video lessons, the fast version of the audio lessons, the online forums I told you about before, a video call twice a month, and the new exercises. The new exercises, remember, are the voice recording, listening test, fill in the blank exercise, and the lesson quiz.
So it’s a little something for everyone. There’s definitely going to be more content at the free level—including a new free Facebook group. We’re brining our most popular feature, the translations, into a lower-priced membership tier. And we’re adding a bunch of features to Plain English Plus+, and this is all to celebrate the great success we’ve had here at Plain English over the last few years. So thank you very, very much for all the support you’ve given us, which makes all this possible.
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