A reconnected backwater named for the bird most likely to be standing in it: herons, beaver, and eagles returned here after a $6.5M restoration pulled out 1950s dams, and lake sturgeon now spawn just offshore.
Let the water open up wide ahead of you. This sheltered pocket where the Detroit River broadens toward Lake Saint Clair is Blue Heron Lagoon, and the name keeps its promise: great blue herons stalk the shallows on those long stilt legs, and if you watch the reeds you might catch an egret, a wood duck, a beaver's wake at dusk, even a bald eagle riding the air overhead. None of it is guaranteed, but this is the wildest, quietest corner of the island, ranked among the best birdwatching ground in all of metro Detroit. Here is the comeback worth knowing. For decades, dams and steel barriers built back in the nineteen fifties had walled these inland lakes off from the river, and the water went stagnant and tired; fish couldn't reach the calm shallows to spawn. Then crews pulled the barriers out — the Blue Heron work finished in twenty thirteen, and a six-and-a-half-million-dollar restoration of next-door Lake Okonoka, led by Friends of the Detroit River with the EPA and NOAA, cut a deep channel and a box culvert so water and fish could pass freely once more. Together those projects reopened close to ninety acres of spawning and nursery habitat. The payoff is extraordinary: lake sturgeon — ancient armored fish, prehistoric-looking, that can grow as long as a person is tall and live longer than you or I will — are spawning off Belle Isle again on fresh gravel beds laid down just for them, and the herons and beaver came right back, the one helping the other, since beaver ponds make exactly the swampy shallows a heron loves to hunt. This whole calm interior is a nursery now, where young fish can grow up sheltered from the big river's pull. There is an honest twist, though. The same gates that re-wilded this water opened in the spring of twenty nineteen, just as the river hit a record high — and with nowhere to drain, it poured into the forest and drowned roughly a third of the old canopy. Restoration and flood, two faces of the same change. One gentle word before you wander: these banks are open, natural, unrailed water edges, so keep the little ones close and enjoy it from the path, especially after rain when the low ground turns soft. The informal beach here is not a guarded swim spot.
