For 35 years, Dolly Parton’s Tennessee theme park was home to bald eagles. Now they’re moving

For over three decades, a trip to Dollywood came with an unexpected encounter: locking eyes with a bald eagle. The Eagle Mountain Sanctuary, run in partnership with the American Eagle Foundation, turned Dolly Parton's Tennessee theme park into an unlikely classroom for wildlife conservation — one where millions of visitors got a close-up look at the national bird alongside lessons on how the species clawed its way back from the brink.

That chapter is now closing. A 2026 storm left the sanctuary damaged beyond a simple patch-up, and rather than rebuild on-site, the American Eagle Foundation has opted to relocate its non-releasable bald eagles permanently to its larger campus in Kodak, Tennessee — a 50-acre hub the organization has been operating since 2023.

A Legacy Rooted in Recovery


The Dollywood-Eagle Foundation alliance dates back to 1991, a period when bald eagles were still fighting for survival as a species. Over the years, the foundation says it helped release more than 400 eagles back into the wild — work that fed into the national effort that ultimately got the bird pulled from the endangered species list in 2007.

Eagle Mountain Sanctuary played a quieter but crucial role in that story: giving the public a reason to care. Seeing an eagle in person, foundation officials note, tends to stick with people in a way that statistics never do.

Bigger Space, Bigger Mission

The eagles displaced by the storm had already been recuperating at the Kodak campus, so the move essentially makes a temporary arrangement permanent. The larger footprint means the foundation can fold rehabilitation, research, and public education into a single, more capable site — something the cramped park sanctuary couldn't fully support.

Officials frame the relocation less as a retreat and more as an evolution: a chance to scale up everything Eagle Mountain Sanctuary started.

The Partnership Isn't Over — Just Relocated

Here's the twist: Dollywood isn't losing its eagles entirely. The park will keep its conservation ties alive through the Birds of Prey show at the Wings of America Theater, where guests can still watch raptors up close and hear about their role in the ecosystem.

So while the physical sanctuary is gone, the storyline it built — one about resilience, recovery, and public awareness — is sticking around, just with a new address for the birds themselves.