While Arbuckle’s slabs aren’t as big as Atoka’s, Mauck noted, it’s reasonable to expect to catch fish up to 2 1/2 pounds from the former group. “A crappie that size is a good crappie anywhere you go,” he said.

Moving farther north into the Sooner State, another two possibilities were added to the list of late-spring hotspots by biologist Gene Gilliland, who works at the ODWC Fisheries Research Lab in Norman.

“I’d say that Thunderbird and Hefner are two that I’d pick because they have lots of crappie in them and they are good size ones,” he said. “Plus, they are both right here in the metro area, with Hefner right in OKC itself and Thunderbird right here in Norman.”

That good access apart, the biologist asserted, one of the primary reasons for his recommending the duo is that some good crappie come out of both lakes each year. “They have some good-size crappie in the 10- to 14-inch range,” he said. “Most people figure that anything over 9 or 10 inches is a keeper-sized fish. Crappie fishermen are notorious for overestimating the weight of their fish -- if they catch a 14-incher, they’ll often call it a 2-pounder. But there are some legitimate 1-pounders out there, and probably some that are considerably bigger.”

Take T-Bird, for instance, which according to Gilliland has had a stunted crappie population over the last 10 to 15 years. “We began stocking saugeyes some years ago and saugeyes tend to feed in the summer on little crappie,” he said. “That has thinned out the crappie enough so that there is more food to go around for the rest of them. Now the growth rates for crappie have improved on Thunderbird. While there are still lots of little ones out there, the number of keeper-sized crappie has increased dramatically, and it’s still a pretty decent crappie fishery.”

Where should a May angler target crappie on the 6,000-acre T-Bird? “There is a cove that we call Five Fingers, and right next to that is the Little Axe boat ramp,” Gilliland offered. “There are a number of brushpiles in that cove. There’s also another area on the other side of the lake called Clear Bay, and it has a couple of our ODWC brushpiles in there.”

As for bait preferences here, Gilliland said that, as at most places, it’s a tossup between jigs and minnows. The key isn’t so much the bait -- which is a personal preference most days -- but finding and keying in on the brushpiles that dot the bottom of T-Bird.

“We put out big cedar-tree piles every winter and put buoys on them to mark them so that people know where they are,” Gilliland said. “By May, crappie are starting to go post-spawn and the fish have moved offshore, so they are going to be on those deeper-water brushpiles.”

At 2,500-acre Lake Hefner, the key isn’t so much brushpiles as rocks. “Hefner is a big bowl and there are not a lot of bays, coves and arms,” Gilliland said. “At least half, maybe a little more of the shoreline is riprap. The prime crappie spots on the riprap are along the dam. When the water level is up, there is some fishing around marina docks. But the bulk of it is on the dam.”