Spring is the movement of the stonefly nymphs in the fast water and the hatching of the first stoneflies. It is the stirring of the salmon alevins up through the gravel, their emergence into huddled clumps still vaguely orange from the partially absorbed yolk sacs, their spread though the river as fry and the flight of most of them to salt water through a gauntlet of trout and mergansers, bullheads and loons and kingfishers and their own yearling relatives. It is in the slow warming of the lakes, in the steady increase of the rivers as the snow comes off, in the rain showers and mayfly hatches, in the occasional days of storm and bitter wind more savagely chilling than the worst of winter, other days of flashing life and color more brilliant than summer’s richest. Spring is bloom of dog-tooth violet and trilliums along the flood-swept river banks, it is the scarlet of the sapsucker’s breast, the flight of the bandtail pigeons, the return of the yellow warblers to alders and willows overhanging the water. It is the geese nesting on little lakes, mallards paired on the beaver ponds, frogs croaking in the swamps. It is the rediscovery of pools and shallows changed or unchanged by a winter of weather, sudden freedom from the heavier gear of winter fishing, freedom from the restraints of snow and ice and short days; it is the whole promise of a new season ahead and the new pleasures that one knows will come, all unexpected from the familiar sport of going out beside water with a rod.
Roderick Haig-Brown, Fisherman’s Spring, 1951
The Literary Fly Fisher 
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