Prowler ... according to Paul Rister :

(quoted from KDFWR website article) "The longer days of March produce more sunshine to warm the surface of Kentucky reservoirs and signal the crappie to move toward the shallows, build a nest and reproduce. Go now for springtime crappie.
"When the water temperatures hit 57 degrees, crappie move shallow to spawn," said Paul Rister, western fishery district biologist for the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources (KDFWR).
Rister oversees Kentucky Lake, Kentucky’s premier crappie lake. "With the last few mild winters we’ve had, we are now seeing the crappie spawn in mid-March," he explained. "The spawning time for crappie depends on what kind of winter we’ve had and what kind of spring we are having."
The droughts of the late 1980s and early 1990s changed the crappie population on Kentucky Lake. Black crappie now outnumber white crappie because black crappie prefer the clear water caused by the droughts.
"Black crappie also tend to come shallow earlier than white crappie do," Rister said, "often in mid-March ahead of the whites."

... cp