The Wild Horses - Gulstav Mose
The south tip of Langeland is home to a large nature reserve with open grasslands, lakes and ponds, wetlands, woodland and cliffs. Here you can encoun...
Langeland’s Wild Horses
Photo: Jonas Legarth
There are a number of areas on Langeland where nature is managed using cattle and wild horses, which live outdoors all year round. These animals aren’t fed are never or kept in a stable, but live free, eating wild plants that they find themselves.
Photo:Jonas Legarth
Research has shown that the Exmoor pony is the race of horse that genetically is closest to Denmark’s original wild horses. An Exmoor pony is circa 130cm high, with a broad body and muscular, black legs.
Photo:Jonas Legarth
Their coats are brown in colour. Its winter coat made up of both short “wooly” hairs and longer “guard” hairs and in fact this winter coat can be so thick that snow can lie on the back of a pony without melting.
The wild horses
Photo: Jonas Legarth
Here you can meet Langeland’s Wild Horses
Grazing an area with wild animals creates the foundations for a healthy natural habitat, it increases biodiversity and brings back a natural dynamic to the countryside. The animals help create a landscape consisting of grassland, ponds, wetlands, open woodland and scrub.
In Denmark bone of wild horses have been found that are up to 11,500 years old. At this time horses were an attractive quarry for hunters. Wild horses are usually considered to be an animal of the open steppe, but in Denmark they also lived in the ancient Danish forests. It is believed that the last wild horses in Europe died out around 1870.
Moo!
Photo: VisitLangeland - Edit Aske Wiil
You can also see many other animals here….
If you are roaming around the island close to sunrise or sunset, you will be unlucky not to see roe or fallow deer. In some places you can also see Highland cattle grazing in the fields. Birdlife on Langeland is exceptional and finally we have a population of rare black squirrels.
