Make yourself at home
Venture into the abandoned whaling stations, nuclear testing sites and villages where wildlife is flourishing
BIKINI ATOLL Marshall Islands
The Bikini Atoll is a ring of coral islets encircling a turquoise lagoon that sits in the Pacific Ocean about 2,900km north-east of Papua New Guinea. It was used by the United States as a testing ground for nuclear weapons during the 1940s and 1950s – most notably for the Castle Bravo test in 1954, during which a thermonuclear device was detonated to produce an explosion more than 7,000 times the force of that dropped on Hiroshima.
The blast gouged a crater more than 1.5km across and 80m deep, vaporised two islets and flash-boiled the water in the lagoon, which soared to temperatures of 55,000ºC. It was left a blighted underwater wasteland, devoid of life.
But in 2008, an international team of researchers found a thriving ecosystem had formed up in the crater in the intervening years. While above ground the atoll remains eerily abandoned, its coconuts too contaminated to eat, its waters are now a whirl of kaleidoscopic life, hosting one of the most impressive coral reefs on the planet.
Visiting Bikini in 2017, Stephen
Palumbo from Stanford University, California, reported hundreds of schools of fish, from snappers to reef sharks, and described the scene as “visually and emotionally stunning”.
Conversely, the fish had been protected from disturbance by the atoll’s traumatic past.
The blast flash-boiled the water in the lagoon to 55,000°C. It was left a blighted underwater wasteland, devoid of life.
SWONA Scotland
Sitting in the Pentland Firth, off the northern tip of mainland Scotland, the small island of Swona was abandoned by its final residents – three elderly siblings – in 1974. Before they left, they released their cattle to graze the grassy sward, assuming they or their family would shortly return to care for them. But nobody came back, and the livestock have since roamed free, living feral on the island and surviving many a wild winter with no supplementary food.
In the absence of husbandry, the cattle are unusual in that they live in a mixed-sex herd and behave in a similar way to wild horses or deer: the bulls fight for dominance – the loser is exiled to a small headland.
The cows are now considered to have become sufficiently genetically distinct to comprise a new breed. In winter, they shelter inside the ruined buildings that dot the island, many of which have lain empty for 100 years.
Swona is also now home to thousands of seabirds, including puffins, who burrow into the steep green hillside, and Arctic terns, which gather each year in a vast colony in the island’s northern reaches, laying their eggs on the churned up ground.
CWM COLLIERY Wales
Anumber of former mining areas in Wales have been identified as hubs of biodiversity in recent years, including Cwm Colliery near Beddau, where a new species of small, eerily pale millipede dubbed the ‘Beddau Beast’ was discovered in 2019. The find followed the identification of the previously undescribed ‘Maerdy Monster’, found at another former colliery in Rhondda Cynon Taff in 2017. Thanks to their free-draining nature, coal tips attract many species usually at home in sand dunes, such as mining bees. So, as entomologist Liam Olds has remarked, “there is still mining going on in the South Wales valleys”. Former metal mines and the area around Swansea (once nicknamed ‘Copperopolis’ for its thriving smelting industry) are also notable for their unusual plant and lichen life. Some metallophyte (metalloving) lichens soak up the iron or copper from the environment, turning rustorange or turquoise in the process, appearing like spattered paint. British conservation charity Plantlife has described these interesting rare species as “precious gems”.
Astonishing numbers of blue whales were being spotted in an area where they had once been persecuted.
LEITH HARBOUR South Georgia
Once the biggest whaling station in the world, the deserted settlement of Leith Harbour on South Georgia, about 1,500km off the Antarctic Peninsula, has since been reclaimed by hordes of fur seals, elephant seals and king penguins. Its longempty buildings stand out as rust-red shapes in a stark and treeless landscape, and while the presence of asbestos means it’s forbidden to enter, territorial seals make the approach too dangerous anyway.
In 2014, a BBC film crew with permission to enter the crumbling dwellings found a ‘forgotten world’ where pin-up girls still smiled from dormitory walls, illicit alcohol lay hidden in cupboards and dusty bottles waited on shelves in the pharmacy.
In 2020, the British Antarctic
Survey announced that the area around South Georgia had been rediscovered by blue whales. “Astonishing numbers” were being spotted in an area where they had once been relentlessly persecuted: some
33,000 individuals were harpooned and butchered for their meat and oil in the first decades of the 20th century. Numbers are now thought to be steadily increasing.
VIEQUES NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE Puerto Rico
In a previous life, Vieques National Wildlife Refuge was known as Camp Garcia. For more than 60 years, it was used by the US Navy to practice amphibious landings and parachute drops as well as artillery, tank and infantry manoeuvres. Later use as a ‘live impact’ zone left it scarred from the dropping of napalm and biological weapons, and littered with unexploded ordnance and dumps of munitions and depleted uranium. As a result, large tracts remain classified as a Superfund site and are off-limits to visitors.
Yet Vieques is also now recognised as something of a tropical wonderland, with 18,000 acres of forest surrounded by bioluminescent waters that harbour Antillean manatees, dolphins and several species of whale. Though many visit the region to spot wildlife, ride horses and swim, the majority of the area remains cordoned off for safety reasons, enabling 190 species of bird – including the magnificent frigatebird, whitetailed tropicbird and brown booby (as well as the endangered red fig-eating bat) – to live undisturbed in the salt flats, mangroves and inland forests. Leatherback, hawksbill and green sea turtles also nest on the beaches, which are considered to be among the most beautiful in the world.
WEST LOTHIAN BINGS Scotland
Afew kilometres from Edinburgh, knuckled red fists rise from the soft green landscape – hills of rose-gold gravel bound together by lichen and grass, resembling a Martian mountain range. These are ‘bings’ – spoil heaps dating from Scotland’s time as the world’s biggest oil producer in the 19th century. Huge quantities of oil shale were mined from the earth, then superheated to produce mineral oils such as paraffin. The process was wasteful – every 10 barrels of oil produced six tonnes of spent shale, hence the vast slag heaps, 19 of which still survive today.
For years these elephants in the landscape stood silently in the background, serving as reminders of the region’s industrial past. But in 2004, local ecologist Barbra
Harvie carried out a survey of the bings’ flora and fauna, and discovered that they were transforming into unlikely hotspots for wildlife such as hares, badgers, red grouse, skylarks, ringlet butterflies and elephant hawkmoths. Among the plants she found an array of orchids, including the vanishingly rare Young’s helleborine, which exists in only 10 locations in the UK, and the greater butterfly orchid, with winged petals.
THE GREEN LINE Cyprus
Turkey invaded Cyprus in the early hours of 20 July 1974. The warring factions – Greek Cypriots and Turkish troops – were separated by a tightly policed UN demilitarised zone stretching 180km across a central belt of the island. This no man’s land swallowed farms and villages and blocked streets in the capital, Nicosia – but has become a safe haven for wildlife in an otherwise intensively developed landscape. Surveys have found more than 350 plant, 100 bird, 18 mammal and 3,391 invertebrate species there, including Schneider’s skink, the spiny mouse.
An abandoned hill village was reclaimed by mouflon sheep – a hardy dwarf species whose numbers fell last the deserted streets, grazed farmland left about 3,000.
THE KOREAN DEMILITARISED ZONE North/South Korea
Between North and South Korea, soldiers face off across a 250km-long, 4kmwide demilitarised zone (DMZ). A neighbouring strip to the south, known as the civilian control line, has also been fenced off and tightly policed since 1953.
This strip of temperate forest, wetland and abandoned paddy fields has become home to thousands of species otherwise endangered or extinct on the densely populated Korean peninsula. The Asiatic black bear, Korean water deer, long-tailed goral and leopard cat have all been spotted thriving in the DMZ, despite the landmines and tank-traps.
Some 20,000 birds also use the zone as a stopping-off point on their annual migrations, and the area hosts the world’s largest population of red-crowned cranes. Two endangered big cats, the Amur leopard and Siberian tiger, have been reported prowling the zone’s forests – though those sightings remain unconfirmed.
One Korean soldier, recalling his time stationed in the DMZ, described it as a ‘natural paradise’ where he saw more wildlife than anywhere else – but recalled nights punctuated with explosions as large animals set off mines and tripwires.
Two endangered big cats – the Amur leopard and Siberian tiger – have been reported prowling the zone’s forests.
CANVEY WICK Essex
The Canvey Wick Nature Reserve in Essex began life as a grazing marsh, then became the dump for sediment dredged from the Thames. Later, in the 1970s, it was developed as an oil refinery, kitted out with vast pads of concrete, holding tanks, roads and jetties. Then, due to planning issues and a spike in oil prices, the project was scrapped.
Abandoned and increasingly overgrown, the site was considered an eyesore until entomologists identified 1,300 species of invertebrate thriving in the untidy mosaic of dense vegetation, bare asphalt and standing water. At least 30, including the shrill carder bee, were on the UK’s Red List. Avian residents include green woodpeckers, avocets and marsh harriers. Described by one conservationist as a “little brownfield rainforest”, Canvey became a Site of
Special Scientific Interest in 2005.
FORTH ISLANDS Scotland
Several former fortress islands off the coast of Edinburgh have been abandoned since the end of World War II, when they were used as lookout posts to guard the entrance to the Firth of Forth. Inchkeith, the largest, has a colourful history – once the site of an early Christian ‘school of the prophets’, and later a quarantine island for people stricken with syphilis. It was also home to a plague hospital and a prison, and was bitterly fought over as a military outpost.
Its little sister Inchmickery – which sits low in the water, and is tightly packed with grey, hastily-built concrete structures – more resembles a battleship than an island, as does Inchgarvie (
No longer in use by the army, this collection of islands has been recolonised by seabirds – including eider ducks, shags, fulmars, razorbills, cormorants, and guillemots – who have repurposed the blocky huts and gun emplacements as artificial cliffs, building their nests on sills and ledges. Down on the ground, grey seals haul out on the slipways and jetties during winter, their pups spending their time scooching around the derelict buildings.