Longleat Bat Cave reopens TODAY after four years
It's home to 42 Egyptian Fruit Bats
One of the most popular attractions at a Wiltshire Safari Park reopens today for the first time since 2021.
Longleat's Bat Cave is now home to 42 Egyptian Fruit Bats and is ready to welcome the first visitors back.
The bats, which are daytime fliers, have good vision and use a primitive form of echolocation to navigate their way through the cave.
Keeper Nadia Rozkoszek told Greatest Hits Radio they're very excited to have the bats back, but the fruit bill has dramatically increased.
"They absolutely love anything nice and soft and ripe. So banana, melon, mango, all of the nice juicy stuff," she said, adding: "They absolutely adore fruit. They eat more than half their body weight in fruit a day."
The immersive walk through experience is similar to the one that closed four years ago, with the bats flying right above our heads.
Nadia said: "We absolutely adore being able to get so close to them and they really don't mind. There are species that come out during the daytime, so that therefore means that they're used to people walking past them and see them, which means that really, we're very lucky to see this species up close and personal."
The bats are joined in the cave by some slightly slower moving friends, Chico and Truffles, a pair of two-toed sloths.
Nadia told us the bats and sloths have been getting to know each other and are, so far, getting along fairly well.
Bat Facts
The native range of the Egyptian fruit bat is Africa and the Middle East, naturally occurring in both valley and mountainous areas where they find shelter in caves, rock crevices and date plantations. They were originally discovered in Egypt in 1810 roosting in the pyramids of Giza.
Across the world, bats are heavily persecuted due to fictional associations with evil, yet they play an important part in ecosystems pollinating avocados, bananas, breadfruit, dates, figs, mangos, and peaches.