Events The Mobile County Public School System’s Environmental Studies Center, located at the southern edge of the city, offers an outdoor classroom unparalleled in Alabama’s educational arena. Instead of chalkboards and textbooks, the Center features native wildlife, plants, and viable ecosystems as teaching aids. Visitors have access to a diversity of habitats within the 600-acre site, including a carnivorous plant bog, twenty-acre lake, pineland savanna, hardwood bottomland, and upland pine forest. A variety of man-made facilities are also present that complement the natural resources and enhance the learning opportunities afforded by the site. These include nature trails, live animal exhibits, an arboretum and native plants garden, pavilion, amphitheater, and an instructional building complete with classroom, laboratories, natural history displays, library, and starlab planetarium.
Established in 1974, the Environmental Studies Center (ESC) offers a variety of educational excursions tailored to the natural science, aerospace, and environmental studies curricula for all grade levels in Mobile County’s public, private, and parochial schools. The ESC also serves college classes, physically and mentally challenged groups, senior citizens, scout and other youth groups, civic organizations and the general public. On average, over 25,000 school children, teachers, parents and area citizens participate in the program annually. In addition, the ESC provides public services by processing approximately 3,500 requests annually in the form of phone calls or direct contact. These requests may be for information or assistance in dealing with environmental problems, wildlife conservation, or animal rehabilitation.
An adjunct to the ESC’s education program is the Mobile Volunteer Wildlife Rehabilitation Program. In place since 1978, this program is funded by donations and is an ongoing demonstration of responsible stewardship for the environment. Thousands of students, teachers, parents, and casual visitors have been impressed by the knowledge that the animals in the Center’s release cages are on their way to freedom through the rehabilitative process. Over 700 injured and/or orphaned wild animals are accepted each year from throughout the southwest Alabama region.
Many of those that are permanently damaged and adapt well to captivity are placed on exhibit and become part of the ESC’s conservation education program. They may serve as examples of the variety of adaptive features of nature, or differing links on the food chain, or their injuries demonstrate the infinite ways man or natural forces can affect their lives.
Over the years, an extensive collection of some 70 animals representing over 40 species of wildlife found in coastal Alabama has been assembled and housed in exhibits built in their representative habitats. The collection includes white-tailed deer, raccoon, opossum, pelicans, hawks, owls, bald and golden eagle, a variety of migratory songbirds, reptiles, and other examples of native animals.

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