Buy a bird: the Key West Wildlife Center's mission to protect Florida's diverse birds

     The Key West Wildlife Center is one of the largest NGOs present within the Florida Keys and is a major component of the conservation of wildlife in Key West as well as some of the other surrounding islands. Their main focus is on helping save and restore injured birds found throughout the Florida Keys back to health so that they can either be released back to the wild or cared for healthily by the Wildlife Center. It saves around 1500 different birds that are injured or sick every year, which has a massive benefit for bird populations as a whole in the Florida Keys. The birds which they save come in a large variety, from small songbirds and doves up to large raptors such as Bald Eagles and owls. The mission of the Key West Wildlife Center is to ensure the futures of several different native species of wildlife by ensuring timely rescues and excellent rehabilitation in order to maximize the chances of each individual organisms recovering and being able to return to the wild.

    The largest protection program that is run by the Key West Wildlife center however is their protection program of populations of feral chickens that live around Key West. Around 2009, the city of Key West made an agreement with the Key West Wildlife Center to protect the populations of feral chickens present around the island and make sure that they could all thrive and would not succumb to illness or other stressors. This protection program has greatly benefitted the populations of feral chickens that inhabit Key West and they have thrived as part of the ecosystem down there.

    in 2011, the Key West Wildlife Center made agreements with several wildlife ranches on the Florida mainland in to help take in rehabilitated chickens that cannot be released to the wild. This is in order to prevent overcrowding at the Key West Wildlife Center with an overabundance of sick or injured chickens. The main ranch that works with the Key West Wildlife Center is Peat Marsh Ranch, which is a large ranch located several miles north of Lake Okeechobee. This ranch has far more space than the wildlife center and is able to house far more chickens than it, helping take a lot of the pressure off of the wildlife center and giving the chickens a much better and spacious place to live.