Hello, friends! The Shad Festival Collection will be splashing onto our site tomorrow, April 22nd at 1 PM ET. We thought we’d take this opportunity to talk to you about the reason for the season: SHAD! This blog post comes to you in three parts: What is the Shad Festival, All About Shad, and Crafting Shad Festival Banners.

Part One: What is the Shad Festival?

The Hazel Village animals celebrate the Shad Festival every spring, when the juneberry trees begin to blossom. The Juneberry tree is named as such because its tasty red berries appear in June (a very important foraging month), but it also goes by another name: SHADBUSH! In April, when its branches are sprinkled with dainty white flowers, the animals know that the shad will soon be here.

Shad are a kind of fish that live in the ocean most of the time, but once a year they swim upstream to return to the freshwater where they were born. The animals celebrate this occasion by making beautiful shad banners out of fabric, paper, ribbons, and twinkly stuff. They hang the banners out in front of their houses and on trees, where they billow in the spring breezes and inspire the shad to swim up the Village stream. For Gracie Cat and the other animals who like to eat fish, the Shad Festival means the biggest and tastiest fish fry of the year.

If all of this is news to you, we are about to blow your mind: Shad Fest is not only celebrated at Hazel Village but is in fact a real human event! Jane (Hazel Village’s founder) grew up attending the Lambertville New Jersey Shad Festival: a community event with fishing, arts and crafts, live music, delicious shad bakes, and general shad celebration. Now you may be asking: what is so special about shad? We would love to tell you!

Part Two: All About Shad

Many people have never heard of shad, but there is much to learn! They live in the Atlantic ocean along the east coast of North America, where they are critical prey for many species such as sharks, tunas, bald eagles, osprey, herons, whales, and dolphins. Shad are uniquely suited to traveling very long distances – many hundreds of miles – in order to reach their spawning grounds. Their yearly migration is called the shad run. The shad arrive inland in early spring, when other prey can be scarce and wildlife predators depend on river fish as their nesting season begins.

American Shad in the Connecticut River. Aren't they pretty? Credit: Bill Byrne, Mass. Wildlife.

In years past, shad arrived in the streams and estuaries* of the northeastern United States in great abundance. The indigenous Lenape people of this region long relied on shad as a springtime food source. In the 1940s, at the peak of commercial shad fishing, there were 400 shad fishing operations on the Hudson River in the spring. Unfortunately, shad populations have steadily declined over the last century. Climate change, pollution, habitat loss, and dams that block migration routes have all been factors in this population decline. But do not despair: there is hope yet for the mighty shad! 

*An estuary is a body of water where a river meets a sea. Estuaries have brackish water, meaning slightly salty – a mix of fresh river water and salty ocean water.

Thanks to the work of local environmental organizations, the shad are gradually returning to critical habitat where they have not been in decades. Look up water ecology organizations near you to find out how you can help! Whether you live in the American Shad region or not, we guarantee that there is wildlife in your area that will benefit from you caring about their habitat health. Here’s one small thing you can do that will have a big impact: avoid putting chemicals on your lawn and grow pollinator-friendly plants instead, so you won’t contribute to runoff reaching the rivers and oceans where the fish live.

We will be donating 10% of our online sales for the Shad Festival Collection launch day to NYC H2O, a nonprofit organization that provides public and school programs at historic reservoirs, parklands, watersheds, bays, rivers and wetlands. Their mission is to inspire New Yorkers of all ages to learn about, enjoy, and protect our city’s water ecology 💙🌱

Part Three: Crafting Shad Festival Banners

The beauty of a shad banner is that you can make one out of just about anything and it can look however you would like! For inspiration, we will show you how the animals made these ones. If you'd like to use our shad artwork, you can find printable big and small versions here.

To make the fishing rod banner, we cut little fish shapes out of some pretty marbled paper. We glued one fish on top of some shimmery pink fabric, with the end of a piece of string sandwiched in between. Then we cut out the pink fabric around the border of the fish, and used a sparkly gel pen to draw eye dots on both sides. 

Repeat these steps twice more, and you will have three fish on a string. Tie the string onto a stick, and now you have a fishing rod banner. 

To make Nicholas Bear Cub's shad sandwich board (which is not technically a banner but is an exciting shad accessory), we printed out the 2 big versions of our original shad artwork and colored them in blue-green-purple tones. 

We used a sparkly gel pen to add some highlights to the edges of the scales. Then we glued each fish to some thin cereal box cardboard, cut out the cardboard, and glued green paper over the back of each fish.

We found some silver sequin trim and glued it on to make two shoulder straps. Make sure these straps are long enough that your Villager's head can fit between them. (Nicholas accidentally made his straps a little too tight, but he managed to squeeze in.) 

To make the sequin shad, we cut 2 fish shapes out of light blue felt and sewed them together with a running stitch around the border. 

We sewed a few curvy lines of sequins onto each side of this banner, overlapping them to look like fish scales. To make the eyes, we sewed a french knot through a sequin on each side. 

If sewing is not your thing, feel free to glue some sequins onto a paper fish for a similar effect. 

We cut three wiggly strips of silver fabric and sewed their ends to this shad's tail, sandwiched between the two pieces of felt. We also poked a stick through the banner at this point, and used a dot of glue inside to help hold it in place. 

To make the 2-shad banner, we printed and cut out four small shad. It's important to have 2 that face each way, so the banners can be double sided. We colored them in, glued them together with a stick sandwiched in between, and tied three fluttery ribbons on top. 

That's all, friend! Thank you so much for reading! 🐟♥️

Learn more about shad: 

The Shad Are Running – But for How Much Longer?

American Shad – Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission

Shad Fisherman Carries On Family Tradition as Catch Dwindles

Riverkeeper – Saving Hudson River Fish

Did you make this craft at home? Send us a photo or tag us on social media @hazelvillage! Questions? Email us at hello@hazelvillage.com. 

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The Animals' Holidays and Festivities