Erie Marsh: the biggest piece of Lake Erie wetland Michigan has left

Western Lake Erie was once ringed with marsh — something like 300,000 acres of cattail and open water where the rivers met the lake. Roughly 95% of it is gone now, drained and diked and built over. What survives in this corner of Michigan mostly survives in one place: Erie Marsh Preserve, more than 2,200 acres tucked against North Maumee Bay in the far southeast tip of Monroe County, almost on the Ohio line.

The Nature Conservancy bought it in 1978, and at the time it wasn’t in good shape — earthen dikes had sliced it off from the lake back in the 1950s, so for sixty years fish couldn’t get in or out and water just sat behind the walls. The single preserve still holds about 11% of all the marshland left in southeast Michigan, which tells you how little is left everywhere else.

Starting around 2011, the Conservancy rebuilt the place: repaired the old levees, restored close to a thousand acres of marsh, and put in a fish passage that finally reconnected the water to Lake Erie. The first spring after, native fish swam into spawning grounds their kind hadn’t reached since before the freeways.

It’s a serious birding spot. Spring and fall, the marsh fills with migrating ducks, shorebirds, and — come autumn — hawks riding the lake edge south. It also shelters some of Michigan’s last colonies of American lotus and swamp rose-mallow, both state-threatened plants you won’t bump into in many places.

A trail runs out along the dikes, open to walkers, so you can stand on the same earthen walls that once strangled the marsh and watch it breathing again, the bay glinting just past the cattails.