Packed with wildflowers, these greater horseshoe supermarkets are fully-stocked with all their favourite insect food – cockchafers, moths and craneflies.
Cows mean cow pats, and cow pats mean dung beetles, a vital part of the greater horseshoe’s diet. Dung beetles are the perfect meal for young bats and their mothers. Dung beetles help farmers too, recycling cow pats into fertiliser for the field.
Motorways for greater horseshoes, linking their homes with the fields and helping them find their way around. Hedges are also great places for a bat to hang about wait to pounce on nearby insects. A hedgerow service-station for bats!
These bats love native woodland edges and rides, where they can hunt moths, beetles and wasps even on wet and windy nights. A shopping mall out of the weather!
Greater horseshoes hibernate in winter to survive the cold months when there is little food. They like to do this underground in caves and mines where the air is cool and damp. Devon’s history of mining has given them lots of hidey holes, perfect for a winter nap!
In summer greater horseshoe mums return to a favourite south-facing old barn, where they use the warm roof-space to give birth and rear their pups. These old barns are found all over Devon, but the bats must now compete with us to live in them.
Meadows, dung, hedges, woods, mines and barns all in one local area – lose any feature and greater horseshoes can’t survive. These bats need Devon and its historic landscape.
