3,400 acres of game country bought with a tax on guns

There are about 3,400 acres of public hunting ground near Vassar, and here’s the part most people who walk it don’t know: hunters paid for nearly all of it themselves, with a tax on their own guns. The Vassar State Game Area was pieced together starting in the late 1940s and finished by the early 1970s, and all but twenty-three of its acres were bought with federal hunting dollars — money raised by a tax on firearms and ammunition that goes straight back into wildlife land. The hunters bought the woods, and the woods are open to everyone.

The state keeps the place deliberately young. Left alone, a Michigan forest grows tall and shady and quiet — beautiful, but poor habitat for the animals people come to hunt. So the managers keep cutting and resetting much of the game area back to brush and saplings, the thick early-growth tangle that deer, ruffed grouse, woodcock, and wild turkey actually want. It’s gardening on a big scale, and the crop is game birds.

Along the Cass River, though, they let some of it grow old. The mature timber on the riverbanks is left mostly alone, good cover for turkeys and the kind of place a walker would rather be than out in the cutover brush. So the area has two faces: scrubby and managed across most of its acres, tall and river-cooled along the water.

It’s worth a walk even if you never carry a gun. You can hike it, watch birds in it, sit by the Cass and listen. But it’s honest to remember how it got here — that this slice of Thumb woods exists because, decade after decade, deer hunters and bird hunters taxed themselves to buy ground and then handed the keys to the whole public.