The Westfield River is the longest tributary to the mighty Connecticut River in Massachusetts, running for 78 miles through Berkshire County and the Pioneer Valley. Since 1993, it’s been federally recognized and supported for its rare attributes as a natural resource.
“It is Massachusetts’ very first designated Wild & Scenic River System, and it's unique because it's up in the mountains, so there's not a lot of industry," explained Meredyth Babcock. "There's not a lot of roadways that cross it, so, we get the huge benefit of having miles of uninterrupted stream.”
Babcock is the outreach coordinator for the Wild & Scenic Westfield River Committee, the local entity charged with stewarding the waterway and keeping it pristine.
“There's lots of forested areas," she continued. "So, we are a cold-water fishery, which is really important to protect in these times. The designation gives us some funding that through comes through the National Park Service, but it's earmarked for this kind of work, the wild and scenic awareness and improving and enhancing the stretches that have received that designation.”
For decades, global environmental nonprofit the Nature Conservancy has been engaged with conservation efforts around the Westfield.
“Both the unfragmented forest blocks, the rich forest habitat that we find in the headwaters, and then the streams themselves are some of the best and highest quality in the state," said Angela Sirois-Pitel, the group’s watershed conservation manager for Massachusetts. "And so, a lot of the science that we've done has recognized the importance of continuing to invest in conservation of both land protection and what we call wildlife and habitat connectivity in these places.”
Babcock detailed the rich fish community that calls the river home.
“In the upper reaches of the Westfield, we have brook trout that are still native, brook trout that hang out in the headwater streams," she told WAMC. "We have a fish called the slimy sculpin, which is not often seen because it, as it sounds, it scooches along the bottom of the river. We have longnosed dace that migrate, and then in the lower area we have American shad and blueback herring and some sea lamprey. We used to have salmon that traveled all the way up, but humans have done an interesting thing where we've made these dams up and down the river. And luckily, people are starting to recognize what some of the impacts and drawback to having those blockades.”
With World Fish Migration Day approaching on May 23, the Nature Conservancy connected with the Wild & Scenic Westfield River Committee to include rural Western Massachusetts in a global acknowledgement of the role waterways like the Westfield play in maintaining the planet’s ecosystem.
“What our hopes are with this is that we can start to really shed some light on the importance and the challenges that are being faced by our freshwater and aquatic species today," said Sirois-Pitel. "So, many of these species, these fish, are in decline, and one of the biggest threats to that decline, or that's impacting that decline, is barriers for their movement. So, things like dams and culverts or road stream crossings that are too small or don't hold the right amount of water for the fish to get through.”
Ten small Western Massachusetts towns lie in the hilly woods that surround the Westfield: Becket, Chester, Chesterfield, Cummington, Huntington, Middlefield, Savoy, Washington, Windsor and Worthington.
Babcock devised an art project to unite the communities and celebrate their relationships with the river for World Fish Migration Day: communally crafting a tapestry of sorts through felted scarves.
“Why don't we create individual pieces of the river and wear them as if we're stewarding little river segments ourselves? Create them with felting artists, and then when we lay them together, they're a continual river, and we get to each take a piece home, and the idea being that we're stewarding our little bit of river,” she said.
The Wild & Scenic Westfield River Committee brought in fabric artist Marjolaine Arsenault to lead the communities through a series of workshops to create the felted scarves. The first took place in the Berkshire town of Windsor in March, and Babcock was amazed at how residents threw themselves into the project.
“This community just knows the river, so they were making all sorts of smaller fish and macro invertebrates, putting insects and dragonflies and the motion of the river," she told WAMC. "And I feel like both of us just sort of stood back and were flabbergasted at the amount that this community already knew about and wanted to celebrate. It was really, really a beautiful thing, and I look so forward to the next two and seeing how they all connect together.”
The second and third installations of the workshop will take place in Becket on April 25 and Chesterfield on May 2. The final product will be on display at the Becket Art Center from May 16 to June 7.
