From where I often sit and write, I can see a woodpile between the yards of my two neighbors to the north.  For some time it has been there.  The miscellaneous weatherworn boards and logs partly concealed by the lower limbs of a large blue spruce.

But as I gazed absently in that direction the other day, a small furry creature and then a second, untangled themselves from the pile and frolicked on the adjacent lawn.  Rabbits, babies of no more than eight inches in length, they reminded me that we are into that season of youth and vulnerability when we can help wild creatures mature.

Above, in the branches of that blue spruce, is the hidden nest of a pair of cardinals, and twenty yards this way, in one of my balsams, a robin mother sits on a nest.  And in the front yard, a brood of sparrows has already hatched and begun its constant and raucous demands for food.  The hope of spring is everywhere.

With the advent of May it would seem impossible for a Michigan outdoorsman to be bored. Featuring the season’s best trout fishing at the beginning of the month and maybe the best bass fishing as that season opens at the end, the pan fisherman also finds good fishing. He can begin bugging for bluegills as the shallow waters of lakes begin to warm.

Forget for a moment the Great Lakes fisherman who has probably been visiting his favorite pier or trolling among chunks of broken ice before May arrived. Instead, consider the fellow who wades the brushy streams. The fellow who waits for spring showers to warm the waters and turn previously sluggish brook and brown trout into ravenous feeders. May is his month.

The last frigid moisture from melted snow and ice has seeped away from the forest’s floor and has been replaced by that from warm spring showers. With the change has come a stirring of new life. The mat of last fall’s leaves, once as packed and hard as the snow above it, cracks and heaves up in response to the mix of rain and sun.

Just about now some of the tastiest and most nourishing of wild vegetables are beginning to emerge across Michigan’s outdoors. First are the leeks, wild onions that show themselves as green spears, reaching up from the deep, black mulch where woods and swamps meet. And if a spring fed creek flows near, watercress, a delicate salad ingredient will likely be growing in green patches, like a mass of tiny lily pads, half the size of a dime.

Along most any waterway new cattails will soon begin to shoot upward. Their roots, set deep in the bottom of lake or stream, are somewhat like an iris root. Their taste is something like a cucumber and the texture between that and a water chestnut. These are also tasty ingredients for a white salad.

Now that spring is getting serious, then those most subtle of temperature changes trigger an activity in one of Michigan’s greatest game fish. Steelhead trout take note of some delicate aquatic mechanism and turn their blue-gray noses into river currents and swim.

In the south central part of our state, it is the Grand River watershed that beckons to the big rainbows. The urge to climb the swollen Grand and her tributaries each spring, takes these choice game fish far up the channels of streams where otherwise no trout would venture. Sometimes, like the homing instincts of salmon, it is to the waters of their birth. In other instances the steelhead seems to be seeking that combination of pea gravel, water flow and temperature it instinctively knows will lead to successful spawning. In still other cases it may be seeking to return to the waters where it was released as a fingerling.

But the trigger is the ever so lightly warmer water. When those temperatures reach the river’s outlets in an ocean or one of the Great Lakes (Lake Michigan as in the case of the Grand) the migration begins. Crockery Creek east of Muskegon, the Rogue River north of Grand Rapids, Fish Creek, Stoney Creek and Prairie Creek, between Ionia and Hubbardston, all have their runs of rainbows that first felt “spring” in their hearts and gills, in the waters off Grand Haven.