In Ukraine, the wild horses are coming back
On the Tarutino Steppe, near Ukraine's Black Sea coast, something beautiful is unfolding. A team called Rewilding Ukraine is breathing life back into six hundred hectares of old farmland, welcoming home wild horses, red deer, water buffalo and kulan, a graceful kind of wild donkey. This spring brought the sweetest sign of all: the first kulan foal born on the steppe in two hundred years. Already the herds are working their quiet magic, grazing back the dry grass and making room for wildflowers and other creatures to return.
What lifts the heart most is when this is happening. Through the hardest of years, the work has carried on, tended by local volunteers, returning soldiers and schoolchildren who chose to plant hope in the soil. Ukraine's nature is as resilient as its people, the project's leader says, and the two hold each other up. When the news feels heavy, picture that foal finding its feet on the open grassland. Life, it turns out, keeps reaching for the light.