Kensington Metropark: a swampy fishing hole turned into a 1,200-acre lake

Kent Lake didn’t used to be a lake worth the name. Before the parks people got to it, it was a swampy sixty-acre fishing hole near Milford — the kind of thing you’d drive past without a glance. Then crews dammed the young Huron River and flooded the low ground behind it. That overlooked puddle became a 1,200-acre lake, and the heart of one of the busiest parks in southeast Michigan.

Kensington Metropark covers about 4,500 acres in Oakland County, wrapped around Kent Lake between Milford and South Lyon. Voters in five counties backed the Huron-Clinton Metroparks system, and crews built the park starting in 1946. It opened in 1947, part of the same push that gave the region Stony Creek and the other big metroparks. There’s a beach, a boat that loops the lake, miles of paved trail, and a golf course. But the thing people remember is smaller.

It’s the chickadees. On the trails by the nature center, the birds are so used to people that black-capped chickadees and nuthatches will land right on your open hand. You just hold out a few seeds and stand still. Sandhill cranes stalk the meadows, bald eagles nest in the tall trees, and the center keeps an eerie old taxidermy collection — including a mounted passenger pigeon, a bird that went fully extinct more than a hundred years ago.

It’s a strange, good thing to stand in a county of freeways and subdivisions with a wild bird on your hand — all because somebody decided a swampy little fishing hole was worth flooding into something bigger.