Charity Island: a 1857 lighthouse and a bird sanctuary out in Saginaw Bay

Out past the breakwall at Au Gres, roughly halfway across Saginaw Bay toward the Thumb, a low green island rises out of the open water with a brick lighthouse on its shore. That’s Big Charity Island, and the light has been standing watch there since 1857, back when steamers and schooners crowded the bay and a wreck in the dark was an everyday danger.

The light did its job for over seventy years before the keepers rowed away for good around 1930, replaced by an automatic beacon out on Gravelly Shoal. After that the island went quiet — no road, no bridge, no ferry, just a few miles of cold water between it and anywhere.

That isolation turned out to be a gift for the birds. Most of the island is now part of the Michigan Islands National Wildlife Refuge, run by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and with no foxes, no cats, and almost no people, it became a nursery for colonial waterbirds. Ring-billed and herring gulls, double-crested cormorants, great blue herons and great egrets, black-crowned night herons, and Caspian and common terns all nest on these protected shores. More than 150 kinds of birds have been counted using the refuge islands.

You can’t just drive there, which is the whole point. In summer, weather permitting, private tour boats run day trips out from the mainland, dropping visitors for a few hours to walk to the old lighthouse and watch the colonies wheel overhead. The rest of the year it belongs to the gulls, the wind, and a beacon that has been telling sailors where the rocks are for more than a century and a half.