Dung, glorious dung!

Grazing cows on heathland helps it, and the wildlife on it, in lots of different ways. Cows eat aggressive, fast-growing scrub species such as bramble and even holly, which can shade out delicate and rarer plants. By creating bare patches with their hooves, cows create opportunities for heathland plants such as Bog Asphodel to set seed. By ingesting plants and using some of the energy stored in them to heat their bodies (and move around) cows help to reduce the nutrients found in the soil. This actually helps specialist heathland plants which need nutrient-poor conditions.

Another brilliant thing about cows is the dung they produce. Because plants are so tough, it takes a lot of effort for herbivores to extract all the goodness from them. This is the reason cow stomachs (and therefore cows) are so large; the plant needs a long gut to travel through before it's properly digested. In fact, cows have four stomachs, or at least four compartments to their stomachs. (If you're wondering, rabbits and hares, which eat similar things to cows, also have trouble getting all the nutrients out of their food. They solve the problem in a different way, by simply eating their droppings, almost literally getting two bites of the cherry!).

Even after it's passed through four stomachs, a cow's dung has enough goodness in it to support a whole host of animals. Dung beetles eat the partly-digested plant material found in it, and they in turn get hunted by carnivorous rove beetles. The fermenting plant material provides a perfect incubator for the larvae of yellow dung flies to develop. They in turn get hunted by bats and birds such as swifts and nightjars

A single cow pat may therefore support thousands of individual creatures. In fact, a single cow can produce enough dung each year to support an animal community a quarter of its bodyweight!

Just think of that the next time you tread in a cow pat!