‘An enormous increase in wildlife’: Cape Media video highlights HCT’s Cold Brook project

Harwich Conservation Trust’s (HCT) award-winning Cold Brook Eco-Restoration Project was the subject of a recently-released Cape Media news video by Videographer Brian Sullivan, who toured the property and interviewed HCT’s Executive Director Mike Lach and Board President Tom Evans.

Cape Media is a nonprofit community media center, and the public-access TV station for the towns of Barnstable, Yarmouth, Dennis, Harwich, and Chatham.

In the video, Sullivan commented that “in its visual simplicity and natural beauty, the Cold Brook Preserve may be a helpful reminder for Cape residents, particularly those who have called it home for the past few decades, that there are still places on this special East Coast peninsula known as Cape Cod, that are off-limits for development.”

HCT’s Cold Brook Eco-Restoration Project, completed in 2025, transformed a retired cranberry bog into a wildlife oasis. The project included rewilding a mile of stream, native plantings, sculpting in four ponds and creating a half-mile wheelchair accessible All Persons Trail, allowing people of all abilities and ages to experience the beauty of nature.

Cold Brook is now flowing freely through the 66-acre Robert F. Smith Cold Brook Preserve for the first time in over a century. Starting in spring fed Grassy Pond, the stream travels under Bank Street through the Preserve and ultimately to Saquatucket Harbor on Nantucket Sound.

“There has been an enormous increase in wildlife and avian activity,” said Evans. “The avian count is somewhere around 162 species that have been documented since we started keeping a count at the end of construction.”

In 2025, the Cold Brook Eco-Restoration Project won two major statewide awards. These honors included the Conservation Excellence Award from the Massachusetts Land Trust Coalition and the Grand Conceptor Award, presented to project partners by the American Council of Engineering Companies of Massachusetts.

Lach said that HCT was “grateful to be able to work with the community and our project partners on efforts to restore and renew wild places like this.”

See the video here:

Courtesy Cape Media

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