Wild Fowl Bay: a flyway rest stop the size of a small county

The water off Bay Port earned its name honestly. Wild Fowl Bay is a shallow, marshy corner of Saginaw Bay scattered with low uninhabited islands — Defoe, Heisterman, Duck, Lone Tree, North Island — and twice a year it fills with birds. The state wildlife area built around it runs to roughly 13,000 acres of marsh, open water, and island, which makes it one of the bigger pieces of protected wildlife land in the Lower Peninsula. Most of those islands have no road, no dock, and no people, which is exactly why the birds love them.

This is migration real estate. The shallow, food-rich waters and coastal wetlands along this shore are part of the Saginaw Bay region. That region funnels hundreds of thousands of migrating birds through every spring and fall — ducks and geese in great rafts, shorebirds picking the mudflats, herons stalking the shallows. For a tired bird on the flyway, a calm marsh full of food is the difference between making it and not. There are not many marshes this size left.

It draws two crowds who rarely cross paths. In autumn the duck hunters come, poling and motoring out into the cattails before dawn, working a tradition the place is named for. The rest of the year it belongs to birdwatchers, paddlers, and anglers. They come for the same quiet water and the same astonishing numbers of birds. The little village of Bay Port sits right at the edge of it, an old fishing town that once shipped fish out by the trainload.

Push a kayak out among the islands on a still morning in May and the noise alone will tell you why mariners and hunters and birders have all been pointing at this bay for two hundred years.