Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge protects one hundred forty thousand acres on Florida’s Atlantic coast, where comparatively undisturbed habitat survives alongside the Kennedy Space Center. Formed after NASA acquired the land in the early nineteen sixties, the refuge occupies a landscape of estuaries, impoundments, marshes, dunes, hammocks, and scrub that supports more than one thousand plant species and hundreds of kinds of fish, reptiles, amphibians, birds, and mammals, including sea turtles, manatees, Florida scrub jays, and bald eagles. It is an important birding destination and offers managed public access for wildlife viewing, while NASA can still restrict entry when spaceflight operations require it.