“We have had that type of situation in West Texas forever,” Provine said. “With drought, you have situations that occur and are prolonged over four or five years with the water decreasing. All of a sudden you get abundant rainfall and water levels rise 20, 30 or, in the case of Lake Falcon, 40 feet, and you have what looks like a new reservoir.”

Provine noted that water bodies like Falcon International Reservoir resemble new lakes after such a cycle is completed, because that’s in effect what they really are.

“All the conditions that a new reservoir has, Falcon has,” Provine said. “Several years down the road, Falcon is going to be really, really hot because of this extended drought.”

While Falcon -- and Amistad Reservoir farther up the Rio Grande River -- are prime examples of how this low-water/high-water cycle can work to the eventual benefit of fisheries, Provine says that such occurrences aren’t limited to just South and West Texas. “That will happen to a much lesser degree in East Texas or anywhere else where we’ve had prolonged low water, followed by grass, weeds, and brush growing up, and then all of that is inundated,” he said.

That could be good news for such well-known East Texas crappie waters as Lake Fork, Lake O’ The Pines, and Toledo Bend Reservoir, all of which were a few feet low as of press time, and great news for a northeast Texas crappie hotspot, Cooper Lake, which was more than 17 feet low as of press time.

“When the water comes back, there is the potential that it could explode,” TPWD inland fisheries biologist Kevin Storey told me in a previous interview about Cooper. “Any of the fish populations can do that. We’ll have an increase in the amount of habitat available -- there will be a lot of flooded terrestrial habitat -- and the first spawn should be a pretty big one. In fact, the first year or two fishing could be pretty good.”

At nearby Lake Fork, long regarded as one of the state’s top crappie fishing hotspots, it isn’t the fact that Fork is a few feet low that has Storey concerned. “We’ve had no tremendous loss of crappie that I know of, but there are some signs that there are changes in the population,” he said of Fork. “Our catch-rates and our harvest have been declining, and we have been having a hard time sampling (the crappie population). It’s still a good fishery -- but we’re just a little concerned.”

Such worry stems not only from creel surveys and TPWD sampling catch-rates, but also from a dropoff in angling pressure. In fact, some anglers have expressed their own growing concerns over Fork’s crappie fishery.

The bottom line: This big-bass factory is still a relatively good crappie lake, although perhaps not as superb as five or six years ago.

Fork’s crappie concerns notwithstanding, even if East and North Texas water levels do not improve over the winter and into the spring, at least one biologist believes that is not all bad either.