St Martin aerial_Mark Godfrey TNC.jpg

St Martin island from the air

(Mark Godfrey / The Nature Conservancy)

This isn't the St. Martin Island in the Caribbean.

The Nature Conservancy said Wednesday that it bought the majority of St. Martin Island in the Upper Peninsula to help protect the land and provide a habitat for birds migrating through the Great Lakes, according to a news release from the conservancy.

The island is barely within Michigan's borders. It's about 11 miles south of the Garden Peninsula in Upper Peninsula, between Lake Michigan and Green Bay.

The non-profit, purchased the land from the Fred Luber family of Milwaukee, who has owned the land since the 1980s.

They bought 1,244 acres, or 94 percent of the Upper Peninsula island for $1.5 million. The Island is valued at $2.85 million, making the rest of the cost -- 60 percent -- a gift from the Lubers.

More than 100 species of birds have been documented using the island in recent years.

"Migration is very stressful for birds, and having safe stopover sites where they can rest and refuel is critical to their success," Dave Ewert, a Nature Conservancy senior scientist, said in a statement. "It has been estimated that 100 million birds use stopover sites in the Great Lakes region, so the protection of Great Lakes islands like St. Martin Island is absolutely essential."

Wisconsin -- St. Martin Island {RAW FOOTAGE} [ALL RIGHTS, Mark Godfrey/TNC] -- CLIP 5 from TNC-MRCC on Vimeo.

The Conservancy plans to, at some point in the future, transfer the land on St. Martin Island to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.

The island is currently uninhabited, but in the mid-1800s there were some 27 families living year round on it. They would fish for whitefish, lake trout, sturgeon and lake herring. The island was vacated by 1889.

The Nature Conservancy is a non-profit that works to protect ecologically important lands and waters around the world, including nearly 370,000 acres in Michigan.

The island will remain closed to the public, said Melissa Molenda of the Nature Conservancy.

"The island will remain closed to public visitation," she said. "We will be working to reduce the deer population, assess the extent of the invasive species problem and evaluate any safety issues related to the buildings and the dock."

Fritz Klug is a news buzz reporter for MLive. Contact him at fklug@mlive.com or 269-370-0584. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ or App.net.