28/07/2026
Remember our former Small Grant Programme winners? 🐹Szapu Julianna Szulamit and supervisor Attila Németh have been conducting some incredible research on the common hamsters of Hungary in Fertő-Hanság Nemzeti Park.
Here is a short article about one of Julianna's recent findings 🐹🚗
There is a cemetery on the outskirts of Szil (Western Hungary), next to the road where our hamster (Cricetus cricetus) project was underway. However, this road does not lead only to our loved ones resting in peace, but to that road section where the road-killed hamsters were lying unknown and unburied.
During one of our field occasions (April 2026), we found ten road-killed hamsters. One of them was in the late evening, when we went back to our accommodation after fieldwork. We found the fresh, still warm and soft carcass of a male hamster, which was probably hit by a car just a few minutes earlier. We put him on the roadside verge. We felt infinitely sorry for him, and that was when we decided to write this article to bring this problem to the attention of as many people as possible. Especially to remind them to be careful while driving.
The next morning, we found eight road-killed hamsters on the same main road section, between Szil and Szilsárkány. We had to hurry in the morning to release the hamsters from our traps after the measurements and the registration, but after that we went back to record the coordinates of the road-killed hamsters. However, to my greatest surprise, for most of the hamsters, we would not have been able to tell at all that they were hamsters ever. Nevertheless, there were times when, if we had not remembered the spot, I'm not even sure we would have noticed that an animal had been hit there just a few hours later. We concluded from it that the road-killing probably is a highly underestimated risk factor in the case of hamsters, and likely in the case of other species as well.
It would be important to take action against roadkill. The main point would be that we need to pay attention to the roads, mainly in the mating season of hamsters, which lasts from April to the first part of August. The most important step in preventing collisions would be to install warning signs on the affected road sections to alert drivers to the increased risk of hitting hamsters and to impose a lower speed limit during these periods. Furthermore, installing a
wildlife underpass for small mammals would be an ideal solution to help the hamster’s survival.
It is summer, and most of us are travelling a lot, so let's be careful – especially at night – and drive safely and at slower speeds in areas with hamsters or other animals
