The Indiana Natural Resources Commission is seeking a second round of public comments on proposed changes to several wildlife-related rules.
The proposed changes include removing previous limits on rifles for deer hunting to comply with state law, removing the Kirtland's warbler and armadillos from the state's lists of endangered species and exotic mammals. The proposed rules also allow dipnets as a legal method for taking frogs.
There are different reasons for each proposed administrative rule. Overall, the department wants to change the current rules to align with state and federal laws and definitions.
Linnea Petercheff, the Permitting and Rules Supervisor for the DNR, said this is the second public hearing on this rule package.
"We hope to go to the commission at their meeting in September, where the commission would vote on final adoption of the proposed changes," Petercheff said.
Glen Salmon is an adjunct professor with the Paul H. O'Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University Bloomington. He previously worked at the Indiana Department of Natural Resources Division of Fish and Wildlife for 32 years. He spent the last seven of those years as the director of the agency. He said public input is critical to the rule development process.
"In most cases, you have some type of an entity like a natural resources commission, like Indiana's had for decades," Salmon said. "The purpose of that is to pass administrative rules that are for the benefit of the public and also for the benefit of those, in this case, wildlife species."
It's common for an agency like the Division of Fish and Wildlife to have experts recommend changes to administrative rules. When that happens, changes are inserted into an administrative rule package that is later approved by the Department of Natural Resources Director. Then the package moves to the Natural Resources Commission to allow public input, and if passed, it can be enforced by the state's conservation officers.
Salmon said the multiple steps in the process allow for public input at different stages.
"Those administrative rules can be updated, can be changed, can be modified, can just be discontinued entirely if they don't think the rule needs to go forward, or they can go ahead and move ahead and be passed and accepted by the commission," Salmon said.
This process can be seen in the proposed status change of the Kirtland's Warbler.
In a statement, the DNR states that because of its extreme rarity in the state, the department's Nongame Bird Technical Advisory Committee unanimously recommended delisting the Kirtland's Warbler as a fully recovered species based primarily on its recovered federal status and Indiana's minor role in its conservation due to its rarity in the state.
Similarly, armadillos can't be qualified as an "exotic mammal" because they now live and breed in southern Indiana. Armadillos have expanded northward due to climate change.
"Things are definitely changing, and you see things like the armadillo adapting to all those climate changes, and that's not true just of the armadillo. That's true of a lot of species," Salmon said.
Public comments can be submitted online on the Indiana Natural Resources Commission website.
The second public hearing will be held in the Roosevelt Room at the Fort Harrison Inn, 5830 N. Post Road, on July 30 at 2 p.m. The meeting is also available online.
Contact WFYI reporting intern Daniel Huber at dhuber@wfyi.org
