Wait there's wild hamsters? Oh yes – and they're fuzzy, feisty, and just as cute and podgy as …

When I was a child in the 1930os," recalls 86-year-old farmer Marcel Riegel, "hamsters were incredibly easy to catch. There were so many that they ate bare patches into our alfalfa and wheat field."

"Before the land consolidations of the 197oS," Riegel continues, "we had hamsters, hares, partridges, orchards and vineyards in the Alsace. They've all gone: replaced by maize. The last wild hamster I saw was in 2000. My dog disturbed it, but the creature bravely stood its ground and chattered loudly."

I'm talking to Riegel near Strasbourg in eastern France about le grand hamster d'Alsace. Until 2011 – when I read in a newspaper that France faced a €17 million fine from the EU for failing to protect its hamsters – I had no idea this charismatic mammal existed in the wild so close to home.

But after establishing that the story was neither an April Fool joke nor a piece about the French denying their pets exercise wheels and nutty treats, it was a revelation to discover that the common, or black-bellied, hamster has an extensive Eurasian range, from its current westernmost limit in the Alsace east as far as the steppes of Russia and Kazakhstan.

Europe's only member of the globally widespread Cricetinae subfamily, this rodent is something of a giant. It grows four times larger than the familiar golden Syrian domesticated variety of hamster – so big, in fact, that it was once referred to as the 'Strasbourg marmot'. Moreover, the species was so abundant in Alsace that, until 1993, it was officially classified as an agricultural pest and routinely exterminated.

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