Volunteers Plant Native Habitat on Michigan Public Land

This is the kind of conservation that does not need a press-conference backdrop. It needs boots, shovels, sweat and people willing to leave public ground better than they found it.

On Aug. 22, volunteers gathered on the Hiawatha National Forest in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula for a National Deer Association public land workday. The project was on the Rapid River Ranger District, where the crew planted native forbs and warm-season grasses into an established opening to improve forage, cover and plant diversity.

The numbers are straightforward: 684 native plugs went in the ground, 18 trays with 38 plugs each. Plantings included big bluestem, switchgrass, cutleaf coneflower, gray goldenrod, smooth blue aster, common milkweed, flowering spurge, thimbleweed and red columbine. That is not window dressing. That is deer habitat, pollinator habitat and early successional cover built one plug at a time.

The monarch angle matters too. Thousands of monarch butterflies use that Upper Peninsula shoreline area during fall migration, waiting for conditions to cross open water over Lake Michigan. Good habitat work stacks benefits when it is done right.

Public land hunting does not survive on slogans. It survives when hunters and conservation-minded people show up, partner with agencies like the U.S. Forest Service, and do real work on the ground. If you use public land, there is no better answer than helping take care of it.