What is a game-bird preserve?

Ask ten hunters what a preserve is and you will get ten answers, most of them half right. The plain version: a game-bird preserve is licensed ground — in our case 1,400 acres of fields, fallows, and creek bottom in Metamora — managed year-round so that upland birds, and the dogs that find them, have honest work for most of the year.

How a preserve actually works

A preserve raises or sources strong-flying birds and releases them into managed cover ahead of the guns. The birds are the smaller half of it. The cover is the real work: switchgrass and sorghum left standing through winter, fencerows kept, fields rested in rotation, water tended. Good preserve ground looks like what southeast Michigan’s farm country looked like fifty years ago — because it is kept that way on purpose.

Why do Michigan preserves have a longer season?

Because a dog trainer asked. Our founder, Preston Mann, trained hunting dogs after the war and knew they stay sharp only if their owners can hunt them. In the 1950s he lobbied Lansing to expand what was then a bird season of a few short weeks. Under the legislation that followed, licensed preserves could fly birds from mid-August to the end of April — nine months of work for the dogs, and of recreation for the hunters who follow them.

Preston founded Michigan’s first pheasant hunting preserve in 1958, a few miles down the road from where this club now sits. Hunters Creek is what became of it, and it remains in the Mann family today.

The state has since gone further — under today’s rules, a licensed preserve may fly upland birds year-round — but the club keeps to the season Preston won: daily field hunts, August 15 through April 30.

The season is earned, not given.

A clubhouse saying

Is preserve hunting wild hunting?

It is real hunting, over real dogs, in real cover — nobody points you to a bird. What a preserve removes is not the work but the arithmetic: the certainty that on a given Saturday in February there will be birds in the field at all. The flush is just as sudden. The misses are just as much your own.

What should you look for in a preserve?

Acreage first — birds need room to be birds, and a field hunted yesterday should rest today. Ask how the cover is managed and what the guides fly. Ask about the dogs, and whether you may bring your own. And ask what the place feels like at the end of the day: a preserve worth joining has a fire going and dinner on.