The Animals Of Michigan

Section 01

A State Made Of Freshwater

No state is shaped by water like Michigan. It touches four of the five Great Lakes, has roughly 3,300 miles of Great Lakes shoreline, more than any state except Alaska has coast, and no point in the state is more than about 85 miles from a Great Lake. Those lakes hold roughly a fifth of the world's surface fresh water.

That geography splits the state in two. The Upper Peninsula is northern: boreal forest of spruce, fir, and jack pine, heavy snow, and animals that belong to Canada. Wolves, moose, and lynx live there and essentially nowhere else in the state. The Lower Peninsula grades from northern hardwood at the top to oak and prairie remnants at the bottom, and its southern third is farmland and the Detroit metro.

The lakes also created the state's biggest wildlife problem. They are connected to the Atlantic through the St. Lawrence Seaway, which opened the system to ocean shipping and to the ballast water that came with it. More than 180 non-native species are now established in the Great Lakes, and several rewrote the food web entirely.

Michigan is also where two of the most closely watched wildlife studies in the world have run for decades. The Isle Royale wolf and moose research has continued since 1958, making it the longest-running predator-prey study anywhere. And the Kirtland's warbler recovery, a bird that nests almost nowhere but young jack pine in a few Michigan counties, went from fewer than 200 singing males to delisting in 2019.

Section 02

Michigan's Official State Animals

The painted turtle designation came from a campaign by fifth-graders at Niowave Elementary in Lansing in the 1990s, and the brook trout replaced an earlier designation of the trout generally, narrowed to the state's only native stream trout after anglers pushed for specificity.

Section 03

Habitats By Region, And Who Lives In Each

1. Upper Peninsula boreal forest

Spruce, fir, jack pine, and northern hardwood with heavy lake-effect snow. Gray wolves recolonised here on their own across the ice from Minnesota and Ontario, and the UP now holds several hundred. Also moose, reintroduced in the 1980s by airlifting animals from Ontario, plus black bear, Canada lynx as occasional dispersers, American marten (reintroduced), spruce grouse, and boreal owl.

2. Isle Royale

An island archipelago in Lake Superior with only a handful of mammal species and no roads. Wolves arrived across ice in the late 1940s and moose earlier, and the two have been studied continuously since 1958. When the wolf population crashed to two closely related animals by 2016, the National Park Service made the contested decision to translocate new wolves from the mainland starting in 2018 rather than let the population fail. See Isle Royale National Park.

3. Northern Lower Peninsula

Jack pine plains, northern hardwood, and inland lakes. This is Kirtland's warbler country, a bird that nests only in stands of young jack pine roughly five to twenty years old, a habitat historically created by wildfire and now maintained by planting and harvest rotation. Also elk, restored after extirpation and now numbering over a thousand in the Pigeon River country. Related: state parks where elk gather in fall.

4. Southern Lower Peninsula

Farmland, oak woodland, prairie fen, and the Detroit metro. Wildlife is edge-adapted: white-tailed deer at high suburban density, coyote including an established Detroit population, wild turkey, and eastern massasauga rattlesnake in prairie fens, for which Michigan holds more remaining populations than any other state.

5. Great Lakes shoreline and dunes

The largest freshwater dune system in the world along Lake Michigan, plus limestone shore, coastal marsh, and thousands of islands. Piping plovers nest on Great Lakes beaches in a tiny population separate from the Atlantic one, and Michigan holds most of it. Also Pitcher's thistle habitat, dune insects, and huge concentrations of migrating raptors and songbirds funnelled along the shore.

6. The lakes themselves

Deep, cold, and biologically simple compared with an ocean, but historically home to lake trout, lake sturgeon, whitefish, cisco, and several deepwater ciscoes now extinct. Ospreys and bald eagles hunt the shorelines, and common loons breed on inland lakes.

Section 04

What Invasive Species Did To The Great Lakes

This is the defining wildlife story of Michigan, and it happened in stages.

Sea lamprey. A parasitic, jawless fish native to the Atlantic, it reached the upper lakes after shipping canals bypassed Niagara Falls. Lampreys attach to fish and rasp through the skin to feed on blood, and a single lamprey can kill dozens of pounds of fish in its adult life. Lake trout, the top native predator, collapsed almost completely by the 1950s. Control now relies on a selective larval poison applied to spawning streams and on barriers, costing tens of millions of dollars a year in perpetuity. Background: how sea lampreys nearly destroyed the Great Lakes.

Alewife and the salmon experiment. With lake trout gone, alewife, another Atlantic invader, exploded and periodically died off in mass strandings that fouled beaches. Michigan's response in the 1960s was to stock Pacific coho and Chinook salmon to eat them. It worked, created a multibillion-dollar sport fishery, and left the lakes dependent on stocked non-native predators eating non-native prey.

Zebra and quagga mussels. Arriving in ballast water in the late 1980s, they colonised every hard surface and filtered plankton so efficiently that they stripped the base of the food web. Water clarity increased dramatically, which sounds good and is not: the plankton that fed young fish went into mussel tissue on the bottom instead. Diporeia, a shrimp-like amphipod that was the key food for whitefish and other fish, has largely disappeared from much of the lakes.

Asian carp. Silver and bighead carp are established in the Illinois River system and are the current front line. Electric barriers and other measures in the Chicago Area Waterway System aim to keep them out of Lake Michigan. Related: how Asian carp are changing the Great Lakes, electric barriers, and the lakes most threatened.

Section 05

Mammals Of Michigan

• White-tailed deer: the state game mammal, roughly two million animals, and the dominant wildlife management issue including chronic wasting disease and bovine tuberculosis in parts of the north.
• Black bear: around 12,000, mostly in the Upper Peninsula with a growing northern Lower Peninsula population.
• Gray wolf: extirpated by the 1950s except on Isle Royale, recolonised the UP naturally in the late 1980s, and now several hundred animals. Federal listing status has been repeatedly litigated, and Michigan cannot currently hold a hunting season.
• Moose: a small UP population from 1980s translocations plus the Isle Royale herd, which has fluctuated dramatically with wolf numbers and winter tick loads.
• Elk: extirpated by 1875, reintroduced in 1918 with seven animals, and now over a thousand in the northern Lower Peninsula.
• Bobcat, coyote, red and gray fox, fisher, American marten, river otter, mink, badger, beaver, porcupine, snowshoe hare: all present, with marten and fisher both restored after extirpation.
• Bats: nine species. Northern long-eared and little brown bats have declined severely from white-nose syndrome. See do bats hibernate.
• Cougar: no breeding population confirmed, but Michigan has verified dozens of individual cougars in the UP since 2008 through DNA and trail cameras, almost certainly dispersing males from the Dakotas.

Gone: woodland caribou, which occupied the UP and Isle Royale into the early 20th century, plus bison and wolverine. Related: caribou facts.

Section 06

Birds Of Michigan

More than 450 species have been recorded. The state's peninsular shape concentrates migrants at Whitefish Point, the Detroit River, and the Lake Michigan shore.

• Kirtland's warbler: the flagship. It nests almost exclusively in young jack pine on sandy soils in a handful of Michigan counties, winters in the Bahamas, and fell to fewer than 200 singing males by the 1970s. Recovery required two things: creating young jack pine habitat on rotation, and controlling brown-headed cowbirds, which lay eggs in warbler nests. The population passed 2,000 singing males and the bird was delisted in 2019, though it still depends on active habitat management in perpetuity.
• Piping plover: the Great Lakes population is separate from the Atlantic one, was down to around a dozen pairs, and Michigan beaches hold most of the recovery. Nests are protected with exclosures and monitored individually.
• Raptor migration: Whitefish Point in the UP is one of the premier spring hawk and owl watchpoints in North America, with large counts of northern goshawk, rough-legged hawk, and irruptive boreal owls.
• Boreal breeders: spruce grouse, black-backed woodpecker, gray jay, boreal chickadee, Connecticut and mourning warblers, and common loon.
• Others: American robin (the state bird), sandhill cranes which have recovered strongly and now stage in thousands, plus bald eagle restored from a few dozen pairs to hundreds.

Section 07

Reptiles, Amphibians, And Fish

Michigan has around 28 reptile and 24 amphibian species. One snake is venomous.

Snakes: 18 species. The eastern massasauga is the only venomous species, a small, shy rattlesnake of wetlands and prairie fens that is federally threatened. Michigan holds more remaining massasauga populations than any other state, which makes it central to the species' survival. Bites are extremely rare.

Turtles: painted turtle (the state reptile), Blanding's turtle, wood turtle, spotted turtle, eastern box turtle, plus map, musk, and snapping turtles and softshells. Several are declining from road mortality and nest predation.

Amphibians: mudpuppy, blue-spotted and spotted salamanders, four-toed salamander, eastern newt, plus wood frog, spring peeper, mink frog in the north, and Blanchard's cricket frog which has declined sharply.

Fish: brook trout is the state fish and the only native stream trout. Lake sturgeon, lake trout, whitefish, cisco, walleye, muskellunge, and northern pike are the significant native species, and several deepwater cisco forms are extinct. Stocked Pacific salmon and steelhead now anchor the sport fishery.

Section 08

Dangerous Animals In Michigan

• White-tailed deer: roughly 50,000 or more reported vehicle collisions a year, by far the most dangerous animal in the state.
• Moose and elk: collisions are rarer but far more severe given the animals' mass.
• Eastern massasauga: the only venomous snake, small and reluctant, and itself federally threatened. Bites are exceptionally rare.
• Black bear: no fatal attacks in most decades. Food conditioning at campgrounds is the practical issue.
• Ticks: Lyme disease has expanded rapidly in the western Lower Peninsula and the UP over the past two decades.
• Wolves: no verified attack on a person in Michigan. Livestock and hunting dog conflicts are the real friction.
• Cold water and rip currents: Great Lakes drownings, especially in Lake Michigan's structural currents, kill far more people than every Michigan animal combined.

Section 09

Endangered And Protected Species

Michigan's pressures are unusual: aquatic invasive species reorganising the largest freshwater system on Earth, shoreline development squeezing dune and beach nesters, fire suppression closing the jack pine and oak savanna that several listed species need, and white-nose syndrome in bats. The Kirtland's warbler is the clearest illustration of a species that is secure only as long as people keep making its habitat.

Section 10

Where To See Wildlife In Michigan

• Whitefish Point Bird Observatory: spring raptor and owl migration, among the best in North America.
• Isle Royale National Park: wolves and moose in a roadless island wilderness, reachable only by boat or floatplane.
• Seney National Wildlife Refuge: UP wetlands with loons, sandhill cranes, trumpeter swans, and bald eagles.
• Pigeon River Country State Forest: the state elk herd, best during the September and October rut.
• Hartwick Pines and the Grayling jack pine plains: Kirtland's warbler on guided tours in June.
• Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore: freshwater dunes, piping plovers, and shoreline migration.
• Detroit River International Wildlife Refuge: an urban refuge with major waterfowl and raptor migration.
• Voyageurs and the border lakes region: just west in Minnesota, but the same boreal fauna is accessible from the western UP.