The Prague Wildlife Rescue Centre is part of Lesy hl. m. Prahy, a public service organisation of the City of Prague. Its mission is to help injured and otherwise disabled wild animals and, once they have recovered, to return them to Prague’s countryside. The centre takes in more than 5,000 animals a year, making it the busiest rescue centre in the Czech Republic. In 2024 it admitted 6,790 animals, in 2023 5,740 patients and in 2022 5,175. The Prague Wildlife Rescue Centre is part of the National Network of Rescue Centres of the Czech Republic, which brings together rescue centres across the country and guarantees a high professional standard of care for wild animals.

Lesy hl. m. Prahy holds a permit from the Ministry of the Environment to operate a rescue centre in the territory of the City of Prague. It has run the centre for the capital since 2012.

The centre is based in Jinonice, Prague, operates 365 days a year, and its staff go out several times a day in two response vehicles to cases of injured animals across the city. The centre runs a 24/7 emergency line, +420 773 772 771, which serves both as a reporting point where people can report finding an injured or otherwise disabled animal, and as a telephone advice line for the public on questions about wild animals and their rescue. Thanks to these consultations, unnecessary interventions and captures are often avoided.

Who the rescue centre serves

The centre accepts all species of wild animals except lynx, bear and wolf. Our most frequent patients are hedgehogs, kestrels, swans, ducks, bats, swifts, hares and blackbirds. About 20% of patients are specially protected species. In the past the centre has treated, among others, a European otter, a barn owl, a European hamster, a common kingfisher, a peregrine falcon, a hoopoe, a European beaver and some twenty edible dormice only a few days old.

Most admissions have one thing in common — people and their civilisation. Injuries are often caused by human activity, which is why we try to help these animals and ease the pressure that civilisation puts on nature.

A large share of the centre’s patients are abandoned young animals unable to fend for themselves, which have lost their mother or their nest and would not survive without human help. Not every young animal people find actually needs our attention, so it is always best to consult the rescue centre by phone first (how to tell when an animal needs help and when a human hand does more harm than good).

Videos from the rescue centre

Branch sites of the rescue centre: the zoo corners

Once they have recovered at the centre, healthy animals are returned to the wild. Some permanently disabled animals, whose handicap prevents their return, find a new home in the forest zoo corners that Lesy hl. m. Prahy runs in Prague’s woodlands, where the public can see them at close quarters. Others help Prague’s foresters with educational activities for children and the public. Freely accessible forest zoo corners can be found, for example, at the gamekeeper’s lodge in Malá Chuchle, in Hostivař and in Kunratice Forest. We use the facilities at the Malá Chuchle zoo corner to run environmental education programmes for schools and weekend events for the public.