MNFI Great Lakes Islands 1999 progress report crosswalk

Summary

The MNFI 1999 progress report is the missing middle layer between the 1993 island bibliography and the 2015–2017 natural-community work. It reports targeted animal surveys on Beaver, Garden, and Bois Blanc, continued natural- community and botanical inventories on Beaver, Garden, and Hog, aquatic work on Beaver, and a Beaver Island conservation-planning workshop.

The bird work observed 133 species across spring migration and summer breeding surveys: 108 during spring, 109 during summer, with 51 long-distance migrants, 55 short-distance migrants, and 27 resident taxa. The study used separated point counts, defined observation windows, and calm-weather conditions, making its island comparisons substantially stronger than an undated species mention.

Bird effort and island comparison

Spring counts ran from sunrise to noon and breeding-season counts from sunrise to 10 a.m. Point-count stations were at least 250 m apart, birds were counted within 50 m, and surveys were conducted with little or no wind and no precipitation. These are standardized survey-period indices—not population estimates or long-term trends.

The table names many taxa that connect directly to the current observation layer, including Common Loon, American Bittern, Merlin, Common and Caspian Terns, American Woodcock, Common Moorhen, Bobolink, and multiple migrant warblers and sparrows.

Targeted birds and wildlife

• Piping Plover: two historical cobble-beach areas at Donegal Bay’s McCauley Point and McFadden Point were surveyed on May 13–15 and June 13–15, 1999. Other historical Beaver Island sites were not surveyed, so this is a bounded effort record rather than a negative islandwide result.
• Common Loon: the report records a pair with a chick at Font Lake, pairs at Barney’s Lake, Lake Geneserath, and Greene’s Lake, and single birds at McCauley Point on Beaver; no loon was recorded on Garden during those observations; and single birds were recorded at three named Bois Blanc lakes.
• Red-shouldered Hawk: call-playback surveys were conducted in suitable habitat on Beaver, Garden, and Bois Blanc. Bois Blanc produced responses at five locations and evidence consistent with at least five active breeding territories, although nests were not found.
• Lake Huron Locust: Beaver dune surveys documented new occurrences at multiple sites, including McCauley Point, Mt. Pisgah/Donegal Bay Park, Iron Ore Bay, and a smaller population near Lookout Point. One open-dune site held thousands of adults and Merlin hunted along the adjacent forest edge.

Forests, wetlands, and plants

The report documented 18 new natural-community occurrences and updated one existing occurrence. The new occurrences included bog, mesic and dry-mesic northern forest, northern fen, Great Lakes marsh, northern wet meadow, forest dune/swale complex, hardwood swamp, boreal forest, open dune, and dry non-acid cliff. Thirteen of the 18 were attributed to the Beaver Island archipelago and represented eight community types, with northern fen, Great Lakes marsh, and mesic northern forest especially prominent.

Hog Island’s Baldimore Bay Environmental Area is particularly useful for the soil–hydrology–wildlife crosswalk: narrow embayments supported Great Lakes marsh, northern fen, interdunal wetlands, and northern white-cedar swamp forest. Low water in 1999 left the bays almost dry. Hardstem bulrush, rushes, Kalm’s lobelia, Arkansas mint, sedge, and twig-rush were named, and four adult Common Terns were observed along the embayments.

A Garden Island cedar glade bordering Lake Michigan contained abundant Beauty sedge in bedrock crevices along cobble-beach terraces and boreal forest. The report names bearberry, two sedges, gay wings, twinflower, mosses, and lichens as associates. Ram’s-head orchid was not confirmed, while approximately a dozen yellow lady’s-slipper orchids were found.

Beaver aquatic ecology

The report visited Font, Fox, Barney’s, and Geneserath lakes, a Geneserath tributary, and Iron Ore Creek. It combined visual/SCUBA searches and lake substrate dredges with benthic kick-net sampling of streams and seeps. Font Lake was shallow at visited locations—generally under two meters—with a flocculent organic mat more than a meter thick over much of the bottom.

These observations add aquatic structure to the terrestrial forest, soil, and land-cover layers. They remain site and sampling records, not a complete aquatic inventory.

Source and access limits

The generated crosswalk is deliberately transparent about access. MNFI’s official report URL is retained as the canonical citation, while the public full-text mirror supplied the page-bounded text used for extraction. The failed direct downloads were 212-byte Incapsula HTML challenges and were not stored as PDFs. The complete bird table is not reproduced in the crosswalk; the index retains its key counts, selected named species, survey methods, and page references.

Connectivity

This report now connects the observation layer to three different kinds of evidence:

1. 1999 standardized bird effort and species richness;
2. named soils, wetlands, forests, trees, plants, and aquatic sites; and
3. targeted species records that can be compared with the 1979/1987 Piping Plover summaries, the 1968–1971 High Island woodcock study, the 2015 MNFI survey, and modern GBIF observations.

Sources

See the sources: block above and the generated JSON crosswalk.

Added 3 August 2026. Recent changes