While some dedicated Nebraska crappie anglers don’t mind fishing the brutally cold months of winter -- either by ice-fishing or from a boat if a reservoir is ice-free -- most enjoy the warmer climes of spring. There’s no doubt that winter crappie fishing is popular under the right conditions as fish bunch up, and once you find one you can often catch a bunch.

But if warmer conditions are more your style and desire, then you don’t want to miss the month of May in the Cornhusker State as crappie by the thousands head to the shore to spawn!

“May is absolutely the spawn, but it depends on which part of the state,” said Daryl Bauer, lakes and reservoirs fisheries management coordinator for the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission. “But some time in May is a pretty good bet.

“In some of the smaller waters, particularly in eastern Nebraska, it’s likely to be early May, but if you get out west or even north-central in some of the Sandhill lakes, it may be Memorial Day and they’re still on the spawning beds.”

Nebraska’s crappie fishing reputation is pretty good, according to Bauer, but he often hears grumblings of comparisons to Kansas’ reservoirs.

“Our bigger reservoirs, being irrigation reservoirs, don’t develop the crappie populations as well,” Bauer said. “But we’ve got some good crappie fishing in some of the flood control reservoirs in the eastern part of the state. And I know big reservoir crappie fishing is better elsewhere, but we’ve got some opportunities.”

Those opportunities include being able to catch either white or black crappie, according to Bauer. And where you find them doesn’t necessarily follow any particular pattern.

“We’ve got both species from one end of the state to the other,” he said. “Depending on the body of water, it may be mostly blacks, or whites, and sometimes in reservoirs we’ll have both species, and from year to year they might take turns being dominant.”

The general rule, like many states with both species of crappie, is that black crappie do better in clear water with aquatic vegetation and that matches many of Nebraska’s Sandhill lakes, pits and ponds. White crappie do a bit better in reservoirs where the water may be a bit more turbid than other water bodies.

Telling the two species apart really doesn’t matter as length or creel limits apply to both, if in effect. And the palatability of one is as good as the other.

But many anglers mistakenly identify spawning white crappie as black crappie since they’re dark and the spots are well defined, particularly on males protecting spawning beds.

However, both species can show various shades of dark and light, but the telltale signs for proper identification lie in the barring pattern and number of spiny rays on the dorsal fin. White crappie have vertical dark bars alternating with lighter areas from the gills back to the tail, somewhat like a zebra. They have six or fewer spiny rays -- the pointed ones that will stick you -- in the dorsal fin. Black crappie don’t have any pattern of dark barring; black blotches appear randomly over much of the fish’s typically deep body like a dot-to-dot puzzle. Black crappie have seven or more spiny rays in the dorsal fin.