52 Week Season is a project featuring interviews with mid-Atlantic hunting and fishing guides, biologists, and other wildlife experts. The focus of the site is the "sportsman's calendar" and the mindset that you could hunt or fish for some kind of critter in our region pretty much every week week of the year.

From yellow perch in March to shad in April to wild turkey in May, below is a rundown of the spring months.

MARCH

Key Dates and Environmental Cues

• March 17 (St. Patrick’s Day) — traditional return of ospreys

• March 19 — Average date for first rockfish caught at Fletcher’s

• March 23 — Potomac River reaches its highest median flow for the year

• March 30 — Average date for first hickory shad caught at Fletcher’s

• March 31 — Average peak bloom for cherry blossom’s at Tidal Basin

Week 1: Yellow Perch

The yellow perch run in early March is one of the great fishing traditions in our region and the rightful beginning to the mid-Atlantic sportsman’s calendar. 

Early March can be a tough time for hunters and anglers: it’s an in-between season when the charms are winter have long worn off but the green shoots of spring have yet to see daylight. Waterfowl guns are locked up the season, and anglers are looking out their windows like cats eyeing a bird on the porch. And then, on a mild March day when the sun peaks out, salvation arrives in the form of Perca flavescens. 

Yellow perch, or “neds” as they’re called around the Chesapeake region, aren’t the biggest fish, but they’re delicious and are the first migratory fish to arrive in substantially reliable numbers. All along the upper tidal reaches of the Wicomico, Patuxent, Mattoponi, Tuckahoe Creek, and countless other backwoods tributaries, anglers will be lined up in hip waders looking to cure some cabin fever.  

Neds can be fairly active through a mild winter, but when the temperature increase to about 46-52 degrees, the males show up first to party, followed by the bigger female perch who lay their gelatinous string of eggs. A warm, sunny day can activate the spawn, but one of those late-season March wintry-mix weather systems can shut if off just as quickly. Finding that window is gold… or yellow. 

Week 2: Chain Pickerel

When you think about catching esox species, you may think about muskie in Northwoods lakes or northern pike in the land of the midnight sun. The Mid-Atlantic version is targeting chain pickerel in an icy river in early March. Like their larger cousins, chain pickerel have a missile-like profile with a pointed, toothy jaw. They’ll hang out around structure in the upper Choptank or Severn tribs and smash minnows, frogs, or crayfish. Chain pickerel may not be the most charismatic fish, but they remain active through the chilly waters of winter and sure are a welcome friend when nothing else is biting so early in the season. 

Week 3: White Perch

At any given moment in the early spring, Paula Smith can be found posted up along the banks of the Potomac, hauling in white perch hand-over-fist. To say Smith knows a thing or two about fishing the Potomac is like saying Janet Yellen knows a bit about economics -- that is, of course, if you allow for the fact that Smith smokes and swears like she lives on a tugboat.   

Smith literally lives off the fish and game of the Potomac ecosystem, and white perch are her favorite. She catches so many that most of them go are tossed back -- “little fuckers, not enough meat,” she says of the smaller ones caught and released – but she still keeps enough in her 5-gallon bucket for a regular fish fry. “White perch are very, very good to eat,” says Smith. “When they come in, we try to make it a one-way trip to our frying pan.”

With all due respect to rockfish, white perch might as well be the mascot of the Bay. They are almost everywhere in the Chesapeake region, from the Susquehanna Flats to the Virginia Capes. When the shad aren’t biting at Fletcher’s, the white perch are usually in there thick to get the skunk off. White perch can be caught with a beer at night off a dock, and my wife's first fish on the fly was a white perch.

The most consistent time to find big ones is in the early spring right after the yellow perch run. When the water temperatures climb to the high 50s and the yellows are finishing up their spawn, the white perch will move in and start their business. “But it's all weather dependent,” says Smith. “When the river gets a certain temperature, bam! they all spawn.”

Week 4: Crappie

By late March, spring is beginning to win a series of pivotal battles over winter. The ospreys have returned to their summertime haunts around St. Patrick’s Day; the cherry blossoms are in full bloom; the spring peepers are singing; and the crappie are moving to their staging grounds to spawn. 

When the water hits the low 50s, crappie will move onto the ledges before they move up into the shallows to spawn when the water heats up to around 60 degrees. This pre-spawn can be the best time to target these piscivorous panfish before they move into full spawning mode and then retreat to their hideaways under brush and timber. 

Key Dates and Environmental Cues

• April 9 — Average date for first American shad caught at Fletcher’s

• April 10 — Average final frost

Week 5. Spring Harvests

For winter-weary creatures, the springwoods can offer a bounty of harvests. “You got all kinds of green stuff coming up that’s edible,” says Paula Smith, a creature of the Potomac floodplains who may be one of the last true American hunter and gatherers. 

Edible wild greens like stinging nettles, mustard greens, watercress, and ramps are sprouting up, and mushrooms, including delectable morels, are popping up throughout the forest.

Rule #1 for wild edibles is to never, ever eat anything until you have a confirmed positive ID. “You gotta be careful because people don’t know and they go out and they start eating this and that, and they can get very sick and kill themselves,” says Smith. 

Rule #2 is to take only what you need. Don’t be greedy; save some for others.

And Rule #3 is to treat that morel spot like it’s a state secret. “If you know anybody who has a morel spot, they’re never going to tell anybody else,” says Smith. “All you need is to tell the wrong person and all your shit is gone!”

Week 6. Shad

By mid-April, the dogwoods are blooming, which means the shad are running. You can time the running of the shad by the sights of cormorants perched on sycamores or herring scrambling up creeks, or by the sound of spring peepers and migrating waterfowl, or even by the smell of a southerly breeze on a river full of spawning fish.

But by far the most reliable cue of spawning shad is the blooming of the dogwoods or serviceberries, also affectionately known at the shadbush.

First come the hickory shad and a couple of weeks later the American shad, or white shad, show up.

When water temps start to hover around 50-57 degrees, the fish start coming in, says former Chairman of the Wakefield Shad Planking Eric Brittle, who also happens to be a Virginia DGIF fisheries biologist.  “If you get a three-day warming trend and the water climbs to about 61-64 degrees, the fish will move in and start spawning.”

People don’t gather for shad plankings every spring because the fish taste good -- as the saying goes, the best way to enjoy them is toss the shad and eat the plank -- but because it’s a way to mark the return of spring and life in the river with good friends the way people in our region have been doing it for centuries. Legend has it that George Washington’s hunger army at Valley Forge was saved by the Schuykill River shad run.

The Wakefield Shad Planking, tucked away in a grove of lodgepole pines surrounded by peanut fields, used to be one of the legendary political gatherings of the year in Virginia. For nearly three-fourths of a century, Virginia’s elected officials would show up in force to slap backs, down beers with small business owners and county officials from across the commonwealth, smoke fish, and roast each other. Hosted by the Wakefield Ruritan Club, it was once a must-stop on the political circuit until most of the voting power shifted to Northern Virginia.  

But Wakefield is still a place the shad start their spring run. “In Virginia, they’ll show up in the James first, and then in sequence in the York, Rappahannock, and Potomac,” says Brittle. On the Blackwater River in Southside Virginia, “the peak date is historically right around the time of Shad Planking — the third Wednesday in April.”

Week 7. Brook Trout

Spring comes later to the isolated mountain streams of Shenandoah National Park, and that’s just the way the brook trout like it.  

“Once the water starts getting consistently in the 40s, mayflies like the dark blue quill and March brown will start hatching, and so will caddisflies, and the brook trout start feeding really well,” says Virginia fly-fishing legend Harry Murray. “If you wanted to pick only one month to fish, it would be April.  I get really excited about the mayfly hatch in April and there are so many aquatic insects hatching, you can’t help but catch fish!” 

Week 8. Turkey

Ben Franklin quipped that the wild turkey and not the bald eagle should have been the national bird. "The Turkey is in Comparison a much more respectable Bird, withal a true original Native of America," wrote Franklin, "though a little vain & silly, a Bird of Courage, and would not hesitate to attack a Grenadier of the British Guards who should presume to invade his Farm Yard with a red Coat on.” Like many Americans, a breeding male, or tom, can be feisty and aggressive, but also independent and skeptical. 

Gobbling peaks twice each spring. The first peak occurs in early April  when most states’ hunting seasons are still closed down. During this first peak, the toms will fight with one another. That peak culminates when the toms and hens getting together in mid- to late-April for breeding, and the woods will go quiet for a couple of weeks. Then in late April and early May, while the hens are dutifully building their nests and incubating their eggs, the gobblers will head back out on the circuit for a second try and looking for hens that haven’t yet bred.  

Spring turkey is an interactive game that uses all of your senses. “When you start, the leaves are off the trees, and then you see the buds, and by the end, it’s full spring,” says Marcia Pradines, manager of Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge. “It’s like you’re greeting the coming of spring!” 

Week 9. Rockfish

The Chesapeake Bay is the cradle of rockfish, and there is no better time to catch the ocean-going stripe-siders than when the trophy season opens up the first week of May.

“When water temperatures are in the upper 40s and you get a big south wind and some big tides on a moon phase, you’ll get some fish moving out of the lower reaches of the Bay and the ocean and they start coming up and doing their spawn thing,” says Chesapeake guide Tyler Nonn. 

Key Dates and Environmental Cues

• Chesapeake Bay water is at its freshest in May (at Thomas Point)

Week 10. Black Drum

Sometimes when you’re fishing, you’ll look up and see aircraft passing by. It could be a buzzing DNR Cessna, a Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 cruising out of BWI, or two F/A-18 Hornets scorching out of NAS Oceana in Hampton Roads. Every once in a while, a lumbering C-5M Super Galaxy, the largest U.S. aircraft with a carrying capacity of 127.5 tons, will drift over on its way to Dover. 

Black drum are the Mid-Atlantic fishing version of the Super Galaxy. Massive, predictable, and, to stretch the analogy past its breaking point, an easy target, black drum are one of the largest tidal fish in the Chesapeake and Delmarva inshore bays and routinely found around the Bridge-Tunnel in May slurping peeler crabs. 

“The black drum run is definitely one of our favorites,” says Delmarva angler Tyler Tribbett. Black drum are primarily bottom feeders with poor eyesight, so the game is to the anchor up and toss out some clams or peelers on a circle hook with some weight. “I usually get a full moon tide when you have to use literally two pounds of lead to get to the bottom.”

Week 11. Red Drum

An angler in Galveston Bay or Fernandina calls them redfish and in Lafitte they’re grilled on the “half-shell.” On Pawleys, they fish for spot tail bass, and on Ocracoke, it’s channel bass. In the fall in Tangier, you can find puppy drum, and in the spring on Assateague, you might hook up with a bull red. But “red drum is official name,” says Captian Gary Dubiel of Oriental, N.C., “and in North Carolina we refer to them as drum.” 

Week 12. Snakehead

Once feared as a menace and “Frankenfish” that would decimate the local bass habitat, anglers have discovered that snakeheads are pretty fun to catch and actually delicious. The Dupont Circle restaurant Little Serow, which the Washingtonian ranks #10 in the city, has served a snakehead dish with galangal (a cousin to ginger) and lime leaf.

“At $20/pound and getting served in restaurants, snakehead is in high demand,” says John Odenkirk, lead snakeheads biologist for Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries. “Some people are upset and want me to put limits on it!”

In terms of catching them, “One of the best times to fish for them is in May,” says Odenkirk. “The ones that are going to move have moved or come back, and they haven’t started spawning yet. The grass is not fully established yet too. There’s a lot of fish in May, and a lot post-spawn in July. But if I had to pick the best time, I’d pick May.” 

Week 13. Brown Trout

Lefty Kreh observed that the color of flies will progress throughout the springtime from the small black midges of winter to gray, brown, pale blue, and later in May, to more colorful yellows, dark orangey sulphurs, and finally, green. The green drake is one of the last flies to hatch and is also the biggest -- the Big Mac of flies, or in hook-size lingo, a #6. Like springtime itself, the green drake hatch will hit the southern reaches of the Blue Ridge in early May and will work its way up the spine until it reaches central Pennsylvania in late May. It’s in this region of the prolific limestone creeks of the Pennsylvania that the green hatch is the most epic. There are so many bugs, and so many big bugs, that the quantity and quality of fish is unmatched for the year. Even the most grizzled, battle-worn fish are overcome by an urge to binge eat. 

“The green drake shows up around Memorial Day, and it’s really something incredible. The locals call it the ‘Memorial Day Massacre,’” says Pennsylvania angler and author George Daniel. “To witness thousands of insects eating and laying hatches is something that everyone should witness.”