Downriver's secret: an international wildlife refuge at the front door

The factories get the photographs, but the Detroit River’s lower reaches hold something no other waterway on the continent can claim: the Detroit River International Wildlife Refuge, the only international wildlife refuge in North America, stitched together with Canada along both banks. Islands, coastal marshes, and restored shoreline from Ecorse down past Trenton and Grosse Ile shelter astonishing wildlife — tens of thousands of migrating ducks, hawks streaming down the flyway each fall, bald eagles nesting within sight of steel mills, and lake sturgeon spawning on rebuilt reefs. The Refuge Gateway in Trenton, with its visitor center and fishing pier, is the front door.

It crowns a riverfront Downriver communities have always treasured: Elizabeth Park in Trenton, among Michigan’s oldest county parks, with its lagoon bridges and picnic groves; Wyandotte’s riverfront promenade; Grosse Ile’s bridges and bike loops; and the Huron River metropark chain running inland through Huron Township toward Belleville. The honest Downriver story is a working coast that kept its wild places — and is getting them back, eagle by eagle.