GREENFIELD — Brookie, meet Shaddie.
The 10-foot-long trout sculpture may be at home at River Works Park along the Green River, but the new stainless steel sculpted sign honoring American shad has surfaced outside Connecticut River Conservancy headquarters farther uptown, on Bank Row.
The stainless steel sculpture is reminiscent of signs that were common on 18th-century businesses and buildings, like its new home at the original 1802 Franklin County Courthouse building. The piece was created by Conway artist Nat Cohen to celebrate the nonprofit organization’s 65th anniversary.
The conservancy, formerly known as the Connecticut River Watershed Council, was founded in 1952 to protect the 410-mile waterway and its tributaries in Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Connecticut.
The American shad is a fitting new logo for the environmental protection organization because it’s linked to the history and ecology of the Connecticut and its tributaries, migrating up the waterway each spring, according to conservancy Executive Director Andrew Fisk. With the help of cleaner water and fish passages at dams as far upriver as Wilder Dam, about 1½ million American shad are returning to the Connecticut River.
The timing of the sculpture — which doesn’t actually have a name yet — coincides with relicensing of five dams and hydroelectric facilities along the Connecticut, noted Fisk, whose environmental organization has been playing a key advocacy role in the process now before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
“We’re hanging out a shingle on behalf of the American shad, and a tremendous amount of our work is about restoring all the migratory fish including the American shad,” said Fisk. “With the relicensing of the five hydropower projects on the main stem, we know we’re going to see very significant structural changes at those dams that are ideally going to allow for hundreds and hundreds of thousands more American shad to migrate up the river and find more habitat and make more shad. So our sculpture is a hopeful sign. This is a permanent, long-lasting emblem of our dedication to restoring American shad.”
Although about 1.2 million American shad enter the river at its mouth, said Fisk, the passage of fish at the Cabot station and Turners Falls fish passages are “abysmal,” with 10 percent or fewer of those passing at Holyoke getting past Turners Falls.
“When we fix passage at Turners, we know that more fish will have more habitat, and more habitat means more opportunities for juvenile shad, and that means more opportunities for adult shad,” he said. “Ideally, that means that in the future we’ll see millions of fish entering the Connecticut, because there’s more habitat.
“We’ve known for decades that the fish passage (at Turners Falls) is ineffective, and it’s way past time to get that fixed,” Fisk said.
The idea for a new sign, according to Fisk, began two years ago with a suggestion from Cohen, whose business, Foothills Woodcarving, designs and creates architectural details, furniture, decorative objects and custom signs.
“I have always had an interest in conservation, especially with river and watershed issues,” said Cohen, who worked with The Steel Shed in Bernardston to fabricate the sign despite some “tricky aspects of the project.”
Brookie, situated along the Green River on Deerfield Street since 2013, was the first of what the town announced would eventually be four sculptures at different gateways to the town. It was created with donated cutlery as well as corkscrews, strainers and nutcrackers.
The Bank Row sculpture, for which the Greenfield Historical Commission was consulted, is among several renovations planned by the conservancy.
Other renovations in the works include improving energy efficiency and reducing the building’s carbon footprint. There will be a replacement of its oil-fired heating system with air-source heat pumps and the installation of solar panels on the rear roof of the building.
On the Web: www.ctriver.org