Haymarsh: 6,700 acres the state flooded on purpose for the ducks

The big lake at the heart of the Haymarsh State Game Area is not natural. In 1949 the state threw a concrete dam across the low ground and let the water back up, drowning about 375 acres of marsh and field to make Haymarsh Lake. The whole point was ducks. Flood the right kind of ground and you grow the cattail edges, mudflats, and open water that waterfowl pour into every fall, so the state engineered a marsh where there hadn’t been a lake before.

It worked, and then it grew. Today the game area sprawls across roughly 6,770 acres in the western edge of Mecosta County, with more shallow impoundments — Featherbed, the Little John Flooding, the Pickerel Creek Flooding — held at just the right level by their own small dams and water-control gates. Crews raise and lower the water deliberately, the way a gardener waters a bed, to keep the marsh plants and open water in the balance ducks like.

Hunters still come for the waterfowl that the place was built for, but the made-up marsh ended up doing far more than that. Anglers fish the impoundments, trappers work the furbearers, and birdwatchers come for everything the wetland pulls in — herons, marsh hawks, migrating flocks resting on the way through. It is a piece of the outdoors that exists because someone decided, in the middle of the last century, that this stretch of central Michigan would do more good underwater.

Paddle Haymarsh Lake and the drowned shoreline tells on itself: dead snags standing in open water, the ghosts of trees that were rooted in dry ground until 1949.