17,000 acres of grown-back farmland, open to hunt

Straddling the line between Gratiot and Saginaw counties is a block of public land big enough to get lost in: nearly 17,000 acres of woods, fields, and marsh that the state keeps open for anyone with a license. The Gratiot-Saginaw State Game Area is one of the largest managed wildlife areas in the whole Lower Peninsula, and it sits in flat farm country where you might not expect to find that much open ground in one piece.

It didn’t always look like a forest. When the state started buying the land back in the late 1930s, much of it was tired farm fields and cut-over timber — ground that had been worked hard and given up. Left alone and nudged along, the trees came back, and crews carved out wetlands to hold ducks and the furbearers that live around water. The result is a patchwork: oak and aspen woods, brushy edges, grassy openings, and managed marsh, each kind of cover holding a different animal.

For hunters that variety is the draw. The area carries wild turkey and ruffed grouse in the uplands, white-tailed deer and cottontail rabbit through the cover, and a strong run of waterfowl on the wetlands when the birds are moving. Birdwatchers work the same ground in the off-season, since a place built for game birds turns up plenty of everything else.

If you only know Gratiot County as crop rows and wind turbines, this is the other face of it — a deliberately wild seventeen thousand acres where the farm fields were allowed to forget they were ever farm fields.