Hamsters Return

Hamsters Return to Nature in Eastern Germany

Germany, warned five years ago by the European Union to revive its field hamster population, has brought a French pair of the rodents to get busy in a hamster-decmiated eastern state.

This week, officials cleared the final bureaucratic hurdles for a pair of field hamsters from France immigrate to a region of the German countryside around Berlin where their kind had gone extinct. Biologists hope the population of European, or black-bellied hamsters, which used to be common from Belgium to the steppes of western China, will rebound in Germany.

The hamster population is one indicator of a countryside's health, according to Rudolf Scholz, head of the local Forest Protection Service. He told the Märkische Allgemeine newspaper that the last European hamster to be seen in Prignitz was in 1986. Before then the animal was common in eastern Germany, indeed there were millions, but industrialization of farms under Communism took its toll.