What is a game-bird preserve?

On the ground at Hunters Creek Club that means 1,400 acres of fields between our Metamora location and our farm in Lum, worked to give upland birds real cover.

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. Good preserve ground looks like what southeast Michigan’s farm country looked like fifty years ago.

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.

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, then check the state of the cover. 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.