Pointe Mouillee: a world-class marsh rebuilt at Lake Erie's edge

Where the Huron River meets Lake Erie, Berlin Township borders one of the most ambitious wetland rebuilds on the continent. Pointe Mouillee — “wet point,” a name the French traders got exactly right — was a legendary duck marsh that the lake nearly swallowed in the mid-1900s. Beginning in the 1970s, engineers built a massive crescent-shaped barrier island (locals call it the Banana Dike) and pumped the marsh back to life behind it. Today the state game area covers thousands of acres of cattails, lagoons, and dikes, and it’s celebrated among birders nationwide — egrets, eagles, rare shorebirds, and clouds of waterfowl in migration.

The human tradition is just as deep. The Pointe Mouillee Waterfowl Festival has run since the 1940s, a September weekend of duck-calling contests, decoy carving, and dog trials that fills the area with people who’ve hunted these marshes for generations. For Berlin Township residents it’s all backyard: walk or bike the dikes any morning and you’ll have a national-caliber wildlife spectacle mostly to yourself.