A hospital you can visit
The Audubon Center for Birds of Prey, in Maitland between Orlando and Eatonville, is a working raptor hospital founded in 1979: rescue, medical treatment, rehabilitation and release. The birds you meet on a visit are the patients who can't go back — non-releasable birds who live here permanently as ambassadors, and the center's guide names every resident.
Meet the residents
The meet-the-raptors film on this page introduces them one by one: Sanford the eastern screech owl, rescued in 2011 with a broken wing that healed too weak for release; Billy, who lost her left eye; great horned owls Charlie — a 2004 Hurricane Charlie rescue — and Jean, a 2001 barbed-wire injury. The family visit adds the bald eagle enclosure (with fluffy babies in season), snail kites, swallow-tailed and Mississippi kites, and pinwheels spinning around the rehab enclosures to keep the patients calm.
The founding story
The archive deep-dive here runs over 4,000 words of narration and it's worth it: founder Magic Meeker's plan was built around an abandoned eagle nest in Oviedo, fifty feet up a scrub pine, with Audubon Florida and U.S. Fish & Wildlife permission secured for Flag Day 1979. The screech owls, one tour notes, mostly hide — but stay long enough and a little face peeks from the back of its box. Small, quiet, and about as far from the theme parks as Orlando gets.
Sources: the eight videos on this page — family visits, a resident-by-resident showcase, sanctuary tours, and a founding-history archive dive — summarized from their entries in our catalog.
Watch: Audubon Center for Birds of Prey, guided
2 videos · summaries from the actual guidesMore Orlando essentials
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