While people in many countries have been living in confinement for several weeks due to the coronavirus pandemic, wild animals have taken advantage of their absence on the streets. In cities and villages, car traffic has almost stopped, tourists have disappeared, and the air, rivers, lakes and canals have become cleaner. Horses, deer, wild boars, bears and foxes have come out onto the empty streets. As RFI notes, quarantine rules do not apply to them. In the absence of humans, they feel freer.
Rare passers-by, as well as people from their windows, watch the behavior of wild animals with surprise and post videos and photos on social networks. In one of them, you can see a wild boar right on the bike path on the central street of Balmes in Barcelona.
In the Welsh town of Llandudno, a herd of wild goats left their usual habitat and, descending from the Great Orme mountain, began to ravage the city lawns. In normal times, these animals come down from the mountains in bad weather, but never go beyond the outskirts of the city. This time, taking advantage of the empty streets, one hundred and twenty goats reached the very center, ate the hedges near the school, and trampled the lawns of local residents. The townspeople called the police, who, as the Daily Mail reports, collected wild animals throughout the city, but residents complain that they have returned again.
Residents of the commune of Ventanueva in Spanish Asturias were seriously frightened when they saw a brown bear from their windows. He came to the village in search of food, like the foxes that appeared on the streets of the Vigo region. And in the Thai city of Lopburi, located 150 km from Bangkok, flocks of hungry monkeys, usually fed by residents and tourists, staged a real fight for food.
Recently, on the streets of Santiago, Chileans noticed a small puma, and in the Indian city of Kozhikode, a Malabar civet carefully crossed the street at a pedestrian crossing. Notably, this spotted animal is a rare species of predator from the viverrid family, with a total population of no more than 250 individuals.
Of the wild animals behaving like owners, only ducks have been spotted so far in French cities. They strolled near the Lyon train station, near the Comédie-Française building, and on the Paris ring road, a family of these birds strutted accompanied by gendarmes.
City residents also noticed that against the backdrop of a sharp reduction in noise pollution, bird songs have become more audible. Ornithologists say that this period of calm has come at the height of the breeding season and may contribute to reproductive success. Toads and salamanders are also lucky, as they can now cross roads that once had cars without risking their lives. Due to the quarantine, the hunting season in France ended early.
Animals have become better off not only on land but also at sea. According to the head of the Calanques National Park, Didier Réault, more dolphins and tuna can be seen in the Mediterranean Sea, and herons have begun to visit more often. These species are often found in the Calanques, but in the absence of sea trips, there are more of them and they can be seen more often.
Experts also talk about the positive impact of quarantine on plants and insects. Jean-Noël Riffel, a researcher at the French Biodiversity Agency, notes in a comment to the France-Presse agency that in April and May, wild orchids begin to bloom, which are often picked by passers-by. This year, this will be avoided. According to another specialist, Romain Julliard, director of the National Museum of Natural History, unmown lawns become an even more favorable environment for bees, bumblebees and butterflies.
There have been many cases in the world where territories abandoned by humans, even in urban areas, are populated by wild animals. Ukrainian scientists and their foreign colleagues have been studying the behavior of animals in the Chernobyl exclusion zone in detail over the past decades, where foxes, wolves, and deer can be seen in the empty city of Pripyat. Marina Shkvyria, a specialist in large predators who has been studying the behavior of wild animals in the exclusion zone since 2003, says that the appearance of animals in the cities of Europe and other countries during the quarantine period is not a unique phenomenon, especially when it comes to countries where rabies and poaching have been defeated.
"The city is a familiar environment for these groups of animals. They did not come from a wild protected forest. Many animals live in the parks of all major European cities, sometimes even wild boars and fallow deer, and hares are everywhere except in the very business districts. True, their daily activity may change, but there is nothing unique about the fact that the wild boars of Berlin parks have come out a little further. It's just that before they came out at dusk and walked along the edge of the park, but now, in the absence of people, they have become bolder. But people will return - they will become cautious again," explains Marina Shkvyria.
According to her, wild animals have always lived next to humans, it's just that "people, due to quarantine, suddenly began to notice that they are not the only" inhabitants of the city. "For a scientist, perhaps the most important phenomenon is that our attention to nature is changing: people realize how much they miss nature," says French expert Romain Julliard in turn.
It is also important to note that the complete absence and inaction of humans does not always have a positive impact on wildlife. In particular, quarantine adversely affects those species that exist thanks to human activity. After all, operations to help endangered species or to combat invasive species are not being carried out.