Humans have found ways to inhabit almost every corner of the globe, but there are some surprising spots where animals still reign supreme. Some have been taken over by invasive species, wreaking havoc with local ecosystems, but others are simply facts of local life. From islands swarming with scarlet crabs to towns overrun with mischievous baboons and forests full of free-roaming ponies and wild boar, we take a look at some of the places around the world where creatures great and small take centre stage.
Click through this gallery to discover the unlikely places where animals rule the roost...
Cats are kings and queens on this tiny fishing island, unofficially known as Cat Island, which lies off the coast of central Ishinomaki City in the Miyagi Prefecture, and that's the way they like it. With around 100 residents and several hundred cats, the semi-wild animals far outnumber people and live the good life as a result. Believed to bring good luck by the locals, they're kept well fed, watered and stroked.
Originally brought over to help with pest control on the island's silkworm farms, the cat population multiplied while the islanders diminished. You’ll find the felines all over the place, but plenty congregate around Nitoda Port on the southeast of the island lapping up the attention. A visit to the cute cat-sized shrine halfway along the road between Nitoda and Odomari village, dedicated to a furry local accidentally killed by a falling rock, is another must-see for feline fans.
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A beautiful island home to hundreds of free-roaming fluffy bunnies... What’s not to love about Okunoshima? Part of the scenic Seto Inland Sea National Park just off the coast of the Hiroshima Prefecture, it’s a 20-minute ferry ride from Tadanoumi. As soon as you dock, you’ll spot the wild rabbits bounding towards you.
Quite how the bunnies came to live here is something of a mystery – one theory is they were the result of a colony of test rabbits being freed as the island was a testing ground for poison between 1929-1945 by the Japanese army. Another says they multiplied after schoolchildren released pets into the wild. Either way, with no natural predators they thrived and now live here by the thousands. They're a big hit with visitors who make the trip specially to frolic with them.
Rabbits not your thing? How about deer? Graceful sika deer can be found all over nearby Miyajima, a sacred island that’s just a short ferry ride away from Hiroshima City. Believed to be the messengers of god in the Shinto religion, the deer have roamed around the mountainous island unhindered for thousands of years. They’re very cute and super friendly, although feeding them is prohibited.
Some deer still live in the mountains but many wander through the streets and temples, and are partial to lounging on the beach too. But it’s not just the doe-eyed deer that make this a remarkable destination. Pretty Miyajima is home to numerous Buddhist and Shinto temples and shrines, including its famous sixth-century Itsukushima Shrine with torii gates rising majestically out of the sea.
Go kayaking or take a boat cruise around this 37-mile (60km) long barrier island off the coasts of Maryland and Virginia for the best chance of spotting the wild horses that have lived here for hundreds of years. You should spy them roaming along the beaches, salt marshes and pine forests foraging for food. Local folklore suggests that the feral horses swam ashore after a Spanish galleon cargo ship sank off the coast or that they were brought here by early colonial settlers. However, it's more likely that the horses are descended from those brought to the island in the late 17th century so that their mainland owners could avoid fencing laws and taxation.
The inhabited isle is split between the two states. Once a year on the Virginia side, usually in late July, the horses are rounded up by local fire department volunteers and swum across the channel to nearby Chincoteague Island where the foals and yearlings are auctioned. The event, which has taken place since 1925 and now attracts huge crowds, aims to manage the number of wild horses on Assateague and protect the barrier island’s fragile ecology.
Wild hens and roosters strutting around car parks, beaches and roads like they own the place is a commonplace sight on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. It’s widely thought that Kauai’s population of feral chickens flourished after hurricanes destroyed coops and set domestic chickens free, which then met and bred with the remnants of the Polynesian jungle fowl. With no predators to keep numbers down, they are quite literally ruling the roost.
The free-range fowl have become a tourist curiosity but are also a nuisance for locals with their tendency to crow at anti-social hours, peck around rubbish bins, dig up gardens, and hold up traffic. Such brazen behaviour also sees them strutting into restaurants and hotels to peck around diners.
For residents in the New Forest, a pretty rural pocket of Hampshire, the sight of a pony walking past your window is not an unusual one. The semi-wild animals have roamed the land here for 2,000 years. They’re owned by "commoners", a term that dates to when the New Forest was first created in 1079 by William I, but wander the open heath and ancient woodlands as if wild until annual drifts or round-ups are held in the summer and autumn.
Wherever you go in the New Forest you’ll see the handsome beasts trotting around. Most commonly bay and chestnut in colour, the breed is unique to the area. They have the right of way and traffic is restricted to 40 miles per hour (64km/h) on unfenced roads. As well as around 3,000 ponies, free-roaming cows and donkeys can also be spied ambling across and alongside roads. The villages of Beaulieu, Brockenhurst and Burley are some of the best places to spot the long-eared locals.
Incredible wildlife is everywhere in South Africa, even in urban areas. From the Tokai Forest in Cape Town’s southern suburbs to Simon’s Town and Cape Point in the Cape Peninsula, troops of Chacma baboons live in close proximity to humans. It’s a little too close for comfort for some residents with reports of gangs of baboons scavenging from bins, stealing shopping and ransacking local restaurants and cafes.
One of the best places to see them is at the spectacular Cape Point nature reserve, where the protected primates can often be seen lounging on car roofs or roaming the beaches, foraging for sandhoppers and shellfish to feast on. They’re also partial to raiding picnics, so eat al fresco with care.
Have you ever swum with turtles, dolphins and manta rays? How about swine? At Big Major Cay in the Bahamas you can go paddling alongside the friendly feral pigs that have made the idyllic uninhabited isle their home. Quite how they came to set up home here is uncertain. Some say they were left on the island by sailors who planned to return to eat them or that they swam ashore after a shipwreck.
The population of around 20 pigs have become a top tourist attraction and they wallow in the attention, paddling out to greet tourists as they arrive by boat. They'll snuffle around in the hope of a tasty treat, but feeding them is not encouraged.
If you go down to the woods today you’ll be in with a good chance of spotting a boar in this patch of ancient woodland on the England-Wales border. Hunted to extinction around 300 years ago, they returned to live in the Forest of Dean after some escaped a wild boar farm and ran into the forest in the 1990s and more were illegally released in the early 2000s. The forest now has the largest wild boar population in England and it continues to soar.
While some people are pleased to see the powerful pigs foraging in the forest once again, many residents aren’t all that enamoured with their boorish behaviour. The feral creatures can wreak havoc on gardens, parks and sports pitches in the area's towns, and they have been the cause of road accidents as well as fatal attacks on dogs. However, a controversial cull to control their numbers has others up in arms.
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This tiny island near Java is home to millions of bright red crabs. Most of the year they’re hard to spot, but visit during the annual migration and you’ll see them everywhere. At the beginning of the wet season (usually October or November) the island’s land crabs move en masse from the forest to the coast to breed and release their eggs into the sea. The island is quite literally covered in swarms of the crustaceans, which are unique to Christmas Island.
The Australian territory is home to 14 species of land crabs but it’s the bright red crustaceans which it’s most famous for. They live in shaded spots around the island’s rainforest, eating leaves, seeds and fruits and living in burrows until their annual march. Special barriers, tunnels and bridges have been installed to help funnel them safely to the seashore. Seeing the crabs scuttle across the island has become a top tourist attraction.
While 'island' is a slightly generous term for what is more akin to a rocky outcrop off the coast of Cape Town, this spot certainly has a vibrant population: approximately 64,000 fur seals. With no vegetation or human habitation save for the remains of a Second World War radar structure, the seals have the island to themselves, which suits them just fine.
However, where the seals go, the sharks follow. Every year, great white sharks arrive in their thousands, encircling the island in what has become known as 'the ring of death', making it very difficult for the seals to leave to hunt for food.
Ophidiophobes, beware! This 110-acre island off the coast of Brazil, named Ilha da Queimada Grande but widely known as 'snake island', plays host to an incredible number of golden lancehead vipers, one of the deadliest venomous snakes in the world. Despite the plentiful number on the island, the snakes are actually critically endangered, and survive solely on a diet of birds.
The snake population is estimated to be between one and five per square metre, which means that anyone stepping foot on the island would generally be within three feet (1m) of a deadly serpent at all times. Needless to say, the island is not a major tourist destination – it's actually closed to the public for the protection of both people and snakes, except for select research expeditions.
In the town of Puerto Triunfo, Colombia, hippopotamuses have truly taken over. The hippos are the direct descendants of four animals kept as part of the notorious drug lord Pablo Escobar’s private menagerie on his luxurious estate, Hacienda Napoles. When Escobar was killed, most of his exotic animals were rehoused, but his hippos proved too difficult and expensive to transport and were left to their own devices.
Puerto Triunfo now holds the largest population of the animals outside Africa. Experts have estimated that there are between 130 and 160, a number that will only increase as the hippos have no natural predators. And, while the so-called 'cocaine hippos' have proved a popular tourist attraction, they're also an invasive species that's wreaking havoc on the local ecosystem. A government programme has now been announced to control the population through a mixture of sterilisation, transfer to other countries and possibly euthanasia.
Gibraltar’s biggest claim to fame is probably the enormous limestone monolith that dominates the city skyline, but it is arguably equally famous for the tribes of barbary macaques who have long been the self-appointed kings of the rock. No one is quite sure how the large macaque population reached the British exclave on the southern tip of Spain, and one rather outlandish theory holds that they travelled through a subterranean tunnel under the Straits of Gibraltar from their ancestral home in North Africa.
Whatever their origin, the macaques are certainly a well-established part of modern-day Gibraltarian culture. While tourists may think the monkeys look cute and cuddly, locals warn that they can be mischievous, assertive and aggressive when provoked, and it is illegal to touch or feed them. They are well known to snatch accessories and bags from passersby, particularly when they think there might be snacks inside.
Colloquially known as 'bird island', the island of Runde in Norway is home to a population of between 500,000 and 700,000 sea birds during the height of nesting season, including 100,000 pairs of puffins and vast flocks of shags, gannets and great skua. In fact, the island boasts the widest variety of sea birds found anywhere in Norway – more than 230 registered species, 80 of which have been found breeding.
The birds share the island with 113 people, who must be accustomed to having a light dusting of feathers over most of the island for most of the year. The birds are also a significant tourist attraction, particularly during nesting season, with birdwatchers travelling from all over the world to see the birds prepare for the next generation all over the isle's rocks and cliffs.
It may sound extreme to say that an entire country has been taken over by one species of animal, but statistics from 2022 show that New Zealand’s sheep population outnumbers its human population by five to one. In fact, New Zealand’s sheep-to-people ratio used to be even higher – it reached a historic high in 1982 with an astonishing 22 sheep per person.
The country's seismic sheep population is the result of its sheep farming industry, which was long the backbone of the country’s economy. In fact, this current population 'slump' represents the lowest number of sheep the country has registered since the Second World War. That being said, these woolly citizens are still to be found everywhere you turn, frequently wandering through villages and blocking traffic.