Hunting and Dog Training Grounds at Hunters Creek Club

Hunters Creek Club has over 1,400 acres managed exclusively for hunting and dog training. Click the image to the right to view an aerial photo of our grounds.

Habitat management is a key component of having a great place to hunt. Maintaining good cover on a preserve requires not only hard work but also a degree of neglect.

Dr. Ed Koczicky, a famous wildlife biologist who had a keen interest in hunting preserves, called maintaining the cover on a hunting preserve a "studied neglect." He meant that there are certain things you need to leave alone and not mess with, and you need to have a sense for what those things are.

A great example is what happened when my dad, Preston Mann, first came to look at the farm we now operate on with its then owner, Ed Wilson, in the early 1960's. Back then, Hunters Creek was still a working farm. This was about the time that farm equipment was getting large in size and hard to turn around in smaller fields. Wilson's farmhands wanted him to cut all the hedgerows down so that they would not have to turn their tractors around so many times and improve their efficiency. This would have been a habitat disaster.

Preston convinced Wilson not to cut out the hedgerows, and that is why we have such great hunting during the winter months. Our miles of hedgerows provide cover when everything else is blanketed in snow.

Occasionally, a tree may fall in the hedgerow. Most people would want to clean it up. However, when the grass grows up through the branches, it makes for ideal hiding and even nesting cover for game birds. By preserving and neglecting the hedgerows, we have created some ideal habitat.

Not all of our cover is that easy to maintain, however. Sorghum strips are necessary to provide both a food source for birds on the farm and an area to get out of hard rain so they can maintain dry feathers for attempted escape.

The seed head on the sorghum plant is an ideal small grain that game birds enjoy and song birds can easily access it for nutritional needs. The heavy leaf canopy of the plants provides an umbrella effect for birds during periods of hard rain.

Sorghum is an annual. Each individual strip must be tilled and planted yearly. Soil tests are done annually to ensure that the crop is getting the nutrients for maximum growth and grain production. All of the tilling and planting of the sorghum, along with the maintenance of the tillage equipment is done by Hunters Creek Club staff.

Game birds also need grassy fields where they can forage for insects and hide from predators. Hunters Creek Club has made a great effort to introduce warm-season, native prairie grasses back onto our farm and to encourage propagation of some native grasses that have always been present.

Before Europeans settled the United States, most of Michigan was wooded. However, there were some prairies, and on those prairies, Big Blue Stem, Little Blue Stem, and Switch Grass plants grew amongst other native plant life. As settlers came and forested the land, they planted grasses they brought with them from abroad, such as fescue and orchard grass. Most of the grasses you see in pastures today are European grasses, not natives.

Switch grass (panaceum) is a prairie grass that grows 8-10 feet tall and has a very strong stem. We have planted many plots of switch grass over the past 5 years on all of our hunting areas and are pleased with the results. Switch grass provides a very dense nesting cover for spring carry over birds as well as a cover source in late winter and early spring.

It is a very resilient plant that, instead of lying flat like European grasses do after a heavy snow, pops back up giving the birds a place to hide during a time of the year when hiding places are sparse. In order to rejuvenate the switch grass and to keep the European invaders from taking over it must be burned off every couple of years.

Game birds such as pheasant, chukar partridge and many other wildlife species benefit from the "studied neglect" of the habitat on Hunters Creek Club. Turkeys and hard-to-find non-game birds, such as pileated woodpeckers, bobolinks, tanagers, and orioles, make the Club home. Deer, rabbits, fox, and ground hogs also thrive on the property.