Hat Island, Lake Michigan: Its Revegetation after Bombing

Abstract

Previous to the second world war, was just another one of the small northern Lake islands, too small to support human inhabitants, but the nesting site of gulls, terns or herons. The general impression is shown in figure 2, enlarged from a kodachrome by Theodora Nelson taken from Shoe Island, 1/2 mile away, in 1941. The center of the island was a tangle of trees and vines, not easy to penetrate. The height of the trees, 40-50 ft. high in the center, dwindled towards the southern end of the island. There the ground was lower and more likely to be partly submerged by Lake at high stages. All of this was surrounded by a narrow shrub zone, mostly quite narrow, that in turn by a beach zone, vegetated with low plants, grasses, etc., abruptly terminating at the top of a gravel slope down to Lake Michigan. In Island Life: A study of the land vertebrates of the islands of eastern Lake Michigan by Robert T. Hatt and J. Van Tyne, L. C. Stuart, C. H. Pope, and A. B. Grobman, bulletin 27 of the Cranbrook Institute of Science, 1948, the following is said about in 1938: Hat lies 2.5 miles east of Hog and 15 miles from the nearest mainland. It is 16 acres in area and has a shore line of about .6