http://www.swissinfo.org/eng/news/international/WITNESS_Wildlife_and_radiation_in_evacuated_Chernobyl_zone.html?siteSect=143&sid=10410852&cKey=1236214361000&ty=ti(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. snip
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.