WILDLIFE & CONSERVATION
Lake Apopka Wildlife Drive
Lake County · Central Florida
An eleven-mile one-way drive across the restored north shore of Lake Apopka, free to use.
ABOUT THIS PLACE
The drive opens Friday, Saturday, Sunday and federal holidays, from seven in the morning until three, with everyone out by five. The speed limit is ten miles an hour, vehicles over twenty-five feet and trailers are not allowed, and the whole thing takes one to three hours depending on how often you stop. You stop often. Some 377 bird species have been recorded on this property, more than 150 of them regularly through the winter, and the Christmas Bird Count here in 1998 logged 174 species, the highest of any inland location in Florida. Alligators, bobcats, otters, bears, raccoons, armadillos and coyotes all use the ground. The history is the point: this was 20,000 acres of muck farm, the lake cut from more than fifty thousand acres to about thirty thousand by a levee in 1941, and what you drive through now is marsh restoration and a flow-way built to filter the water
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