Yet in 1998, a conservation program brought a rare wild horse there on purpose. A 2019 study by Sergii Gashchak and Sergii Paskevych, published in Theriologia Ukrainica , used camera traps in 2018 and counted 137 Przewalski’s horses in the Ukrainian part of the exclusion zone. Chernobyl is known as a place people had to flee. That number is more impressive when you look at how the story started. Poaching and early losses took their toll, but the herd survived.
The project got off to a difficult start. Eight horses died while being transported, or soon after, the same paper noted. They failed to adapt, and soon died out, without offspring. They also found that wolves and disease had little effect on the herd. The wild horses are not easy to count. Gashchak and Paskevych say forests are taking over old meadows and sightings in the woods are rare. Cameras help. The horses were more likely to come at night in winter and at dawn and dusk in summer. The authors say this method could help monitor the herd, whose size and genetic diversity were unknown at the time. This is not a simple happy ending. Zharkikh and Yasynetska also warned that killing off some of the early horses’ offspring could reduce genetic diversity. But the numbers are encouraging. It shows that a small herd can bounce back, though it still needs careful watching.
The surviving original group bred well, and between 1999 and 2003 the population grew, peaking at 65 horses in 2003 and 2004. In 2004, another 13 horses from city zoos were released without a settling-in period. By October 2007, the number had decreased to between 30 and 40 horses. A 2020 study by Schlichting, Dombrovski, and Beasley in Mammal Research placed cameras at the entrances of abandoned buildings. In the winter of 2016 to 2017, horses were seen 35 times at nine of the ten monitored buildings. In the summer of 2018, they were detected 149 times at all eight buildings monitored that season. At least two males in the 2019 study showed signs of interbreeding with domestic horses. A herd that fell to 30 to 40 horses in 2007 was counted at 137 in 2018.
The authors report that over 70 percent of all deaths with a known cause were due to illegal hunting .
