Burlington Trout Parade celebrates kids raising fish, learning nature

Kids shouted, stilt-walkers strode and paper-mache puppets swayed above the crowd as a procession snaked through downtown Burlington last week.

What for? Trout.

Sustainability Academy students and their supporters marched across the city to the beat of bucket drummers May 29 for the second annual Trout Parade, a showcase of their conservation efforts for the state’s official cold-water fish.

Their chants and hoisted fish-shaped cutouts served as a send-off to brook trout raised by students as part of a schoolwide science project.

“The Trout Parade was really just our students lining up to say goodbye as we loaded them onto the bus to be released,” said Kestrel Plump, a sustainability coach at the academy.

For about five months this year, the school lobby became a hatchery as students cultivated fish from eggs supplied by regional conservation group Trout Unlimited.

Interim Principal Antony Dennis said the trout would be released in the Huntington River the next day, May 30.

“This is the second year that it’s been this big that we actually got to a point where it went off campus,” Dennis said. “It used to be a small event.”

The parade began for students outside the school as residents set out from The Flynn to join them and continue together to Battery Park.

The school has conducted the project for roughly five years, but this was only its second time partnering with The Flynn and Vermont puppeteers Janice Walrafen and Erik Gillard, or Erok.

The kids thought the jumbo puppets were magical, Walrafen said. “The same with the masks. You put on a mask, and then all of a sudden you get to be transformed as something other than your little self,” she said. “You get to be part of something bigger.”

Onlookers, bicyclists and pedestrians stopped and recorded the spectacle with their phones.

If they had any question about its object, answers came by way of lilting treble chants.

“Tell me what it’s all about!” a parade leader called out over a megaphone.

“Trout!” a chorus of kids chimed back.

They followed their leader in reciting: “We love the trout, but we must let them out!”

The parade concluded with a pageant accompanied by a harpist. The students were sent off with ice cream given out by retired University of Vermont faculty member Patrick Malone.

Asked if students get attached to the aspiring fish or just see them as blobs in a science project, Plump, the school sustainability coach, let a group of girls answer.

“The first one,” one of them said.

And were they happy to see their piscine pals released?

“Quite,” another responded.

Corey Arwood is the Burlington Free Press city reporter and can be reached by email at clarwood@gannett.com.