Trailing arbutus (Epigaea repens) blooms now with hundreds or thousands of very fragrant, pink and white, half-inch flowers, a beautiful sight. It covers the ground (epigaea translates into “on the earth”) where acid soils and shady conditions occur, and for this reason is associated with oaks, which acidify the soil and provide shade. Both Nova Scotia and Massachusetts claim them as their floral emblem (state flower).

Alder leaf beetles (Agelastica alni) appear on the early leaves of various alder and beech tree species. “Pregnant” females can be witnessed depositing eggs. Larvae in their first and second stages will make small holes; in their third stage, large holes.

Whitetail deer (Odocoileus virginianus) are putting on weight. This adaptable creature, with four stomachs, can survive on tree buds and bark. But spring vegetation helps replace weight lost over the winter, quickly. Males increase 20% or more in weight during April and May.

Invasive species often gain ground by leafing out early in the season, shading rivals. Honeysuckles (several Lonicera species) are examples. Their leaves fan out this week or next. The flowers smell great for a plant that has been labeled a noxious weed and an invasive species, and has been banned or prohibited in several states, with no noticeable effect.

Warblers return to confuse us. There are fifty species in North America, but we really only have five species to distinguish in New England. The magnolia warbler (Setophaga magnolia), parula warbler (Setophaga americana) and blackburnian warbler (Setophaga fusca) are the colorful ones; the northern water thrush (Parkesia noveboracensis) (a warbler despite it’s name) is nondescript except for it’s beautiful song; and the ovenbird (Seiurus aurocapilla) has perhaps the loudest song in the New England forest.

The much loved, much hated dandelions (Taraxacum officinale) make their showy yellow return. Dandelion has many medicinal uses, and the entire plant is edible—in fact, seed packets of garden cultivars are available. Just don’t tell the neighbors you are planting dandelions.

Thursday, May 1, is May Day. Before it was a religious, legal, and international worker’s holiday, it was an astronomical event: half way between the spring equinox and the summer solstice. Time flies.

Suckers (Catostomus commersonii) are also called white sucker, common sucker, mullet, and brook sucker. They get that last nickname from their habit of spawning, at this time of year, in brooks and streams that seem too small for their foot-long-plus, 2- to 6-pound size. Watch their backs as they struggle upstream until they can go no further. They are surprisingly good eating for a fish that gets it’s nutrition from muck and rotting vegetation.

It’s fiddlehead season. Ostritch fern (Catostomus commersonii) is the local favorite, but worldwide dozens of species are used. Seasonal, wild-crafted fiddleheads are the only kind. How many other plants are part of ethnic cuisine everywhere, and are nowhere cultivated?

Eastern newts (Notophthalmus viridescens) are laying tiny fertilized eggs, carefully, one at a time, up to 250 of them. Have you seen the tiny, bright orange forest creature and held it in your hands? What you have held is not an adult, but a terrestrial stage of this mostly aquatic amphibian. During this stage, which lasts up to four years, an individual is called an eft. Most often they are misidentified as a salamander. After a grand tour on land, the eft grows fins and returns to life in the water (except for a brief mating on land). Offspring are larvae, have gills and live underwater until late summer, when they crawl out to become efts, spending winters semi-frozen under rocks and logs.

The weather is warm, shorts and sandals. But on plenty of forested mountainsides snow lingers. Hiking trails are still too muddy, generally, to reach the snowy parts, but old town roads sometimes cut through spruce woods still harboring snowbanks, and north-facing caves in several spots keep ice until the end of May.