Orchard Road Bog

From the air, water glints from between tamarack and leatherleaf, making the bog sparkle like a diamond. On the ground, it’s an elusive maze through dense shrubs growing from hummocks of sphagnum moss. On paper, its unique, high-quality features put this bog in the “excellent” category. And on maps, it’s a giant green emerald bordering a future conservation easement, a biodiversity hub, and a habitat corridor.

SWMLC recently conserved 82.5-acre Orchard Road Bog using a combination of funds provided by generous private donors and other moneys set aside for land protection in Barry County. It is made up of two properties separated by a road that combine to make it our 58th preserve and the very first bog in our portfolio.

Most of the 30-acre north tract is covered in white pines, a plush carpet of sphagnum moss, and a dense thicket of native buttonbush, winterberry, and highbush blueberry – a natural community officially known as “Poor Conifer Swamp” that is extremely rare in our region. Poor Conifer Swamps often feature black spruce, but this far-southern example has little to none.

The 52.5-acre south tract is a large, classic sphagnum bog. It’s an open landscape with a big sky, but also a labyrinth of head-high leatherleaf shrubs and young tamaracks growing out of sphagnum mounds where hikers can easily lose sight and sound of one another. Former landowners laid a trail of wooden boards through the maze that leads to islands of oak and white pine. In between the planks, there’s a slurry of sucking mud and boot-deep water swirling with bits of moss that looks gross but smells surprisingly okay, without the expected swampy scent.

Odor is not the only way that bogs differ from other wetlands. These ancient habitats often occur in low areas left behind by glaciers and are typically fed by rainwater instead of streams or springs, so inputs of minerals, nutrients, and oxygen are low. In a self-fulfilling cycle, tannin from centuries of steeping sphagnum moss and other vegetation makes the water so acidic that only specially adapted plants can survive, such as orchids, bladderworts, and carnivorous plants like sundews and pitcher plants that supplement their diet with insect protein.

Protecting property that’s too squishy to develop might not seem necessary, but bogs are extremely vulnerable to runoff pollution from lawns, roads, and farms – and easily abused by the careless use of vehicles. They’re valuable to regional ecosystems because their combined acidity, saturation, and slow flow makes them superbly adapted to clean and filter water. And, though they only cover 3% of the Earth’s surface, they store huge amounts of carbon in their slowly decomposing vegetation, double the amount sequestered by all the world’s forests, according to the journal Nature.

When combined with the neighboring wetlands, Orchard Road Bog’s unique habitats are part of the largest Bog/Poor Conifer Swamp complex in southern Michigan, measuring close to 600 acres. The north tract feeds the Spring Brook subwatershed and is adjacent to a property that will likely be protected by a SWMLC conservation easement in the future. The south tract is part of the Cedar Creek subwatershed and is within SWMLC’s Nature’s Network ‘Augusta Creek Corridor’. Both portions are in Nature’s Network’s ‘Barry Biodiversity Hub’ and included as priority sites in Four Townships Water Resource Council’s Gull and Augusta Creeks Watershed Management Plan.

If all this weren’t enough, Orchard Road Bog is rich in stories as well as conservation value, like the legend of the buried Corvette, or the one about the cart and team of horses that went off the plank road, never to be found again . . . otherworldly facets to this environmental jewel.