Day 242

This little fuzzy Woolly bear caterpillar was on my rose bush which I received from Emma for my birthday!  I am very partial to little caterpillars like this.

We watched a History channel programme tonight called Life After People.  Theorizing about how nature would take over if every human being were suddenly to die. 

I imagined all the animals which would die of starvation, stuck in people's houses, dogs, cats, guinea pigs, etc.  Apparently only the medium-size mongrel dogs which managed to escape their houses, would survive to eventually join packs of feral dogs.  The short-snouted and the long-nosed, those with little legs, and those bred too large, would all die off.
Other carnivores would soon follow, and there was some speculation about zoo animals which, if they managed to escape their boundaries, would probably become predators, especially the big cats.  Tigers roaming through Central Park.

To aid the investigators in their theory, the Ukrainian abandoned city Prypiat is observed, twenty years after the Chernobyl explosion nearby meant that its nearly 50 000 people had to be evacuated. And as so often happens with our easy access to information on the computer, from googling a site about Prypiat and what happened there, I came upon a striking short film of about 15 minutes long, (which I watched in its entirety, even though I am supposed to be finishing up here and going to bed) called The Door, about a little family and what happened to them.  And then found that the film is based on a true story about a man called Nikolai Kalugin and his wife and daughter, who were all evacuated from Prypiat.  An amazing piece, filmed like memories, with blue and white as the dominant colours, absolutely beautiful.

Prypiat is situated in the Red forest.   The initial radiation was enough to kill off all the wildlife, and many trees, but now there is a resurgence of life.  Wolves, beaver, moose have thrived, and Red deer are plentiful there, and they are hardly found in any other region.  The population of Russian wild boar is 10 to 15 times higher than outside the Exclusion Zone, or Zone of Alienation, an enormous largely rural area which used to be home to more than 120 000 people.  A soccer stadium still has cracked and broken bleacher seats, but the field is unrecognizable as a field, it has instead become a mixed deciduous forest.  In twenty years.  There are even some re-settlers, who the authorities eventually resigned themselves to, who live in the Zone.

Humans' mastery over nature has always been only an illusion.

Self-portrait - Black & White.