Location

The Central Michigan University Biological Station is located on Beaver Island in northern Lake Michigan. The island is about 13 miles long and 6.5 miles wide with an area of about 58 square miles. It boasts seven inland lakes, largely undeveloped, each being biologically unique when compared with the others. Beaver Island is about 32 miles northwest of Charlevoix, Michigan and is served by ferry out of Charlevoix operating from mid April until December annually, and by a year-round commercial air taxi service from the the Charlevoix Airport.

Beaver Island is inhabited by over 500 year-round residents, most of whom live at the north end of the island in the town of St. James on a beautiful natural harbor. This community has restaurants, grocery stores, a public library, taverns, a medical center, a K-12 school, churches and service facilities not unlike many towns its size on the mainland. Although the island supports a modest lumbering industry and a small fishery, its economic base is largely derived from summertime tourism, at which time the island's population swells substantially.

Beaver Head Lighthouse at the south end of Beaver Island

The natural habitat of Beaver Island is extremely varied. There are abundant cedar swamps, upland and lowland coniferous forests, beech-maple climax forest associations, sand dunes, marshes and beaver dams. Abandoned attempts at agriculture dating from the early 19th century have created extensive old field successional areas of varied age and vegetational composition. Currently, the majority of Beaver Island's aquatic and terrestrial ecological associations are largely untouched by human development and are readily accessible for study, making this an ideal site for a biological field station.

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