INDIANAPOLIS — During the months of June and July, you can help the Indiana DNR collect data about wildlife along waterways.

The Paddlecraft Wildlife Index started in 2020. This project utilizes volunteers who are already out paddleboarding, canoeing or kayaking. After paddling, volunteers fill out a short survey via postcard about the number and type of animals spotted.

One volunteer in the Paddlecraft Wildlife Index project is Erica Weddle. She operates Simply Fitness in Brown County. You can often find her leading group paddleboard trips on Yellowwood Lake.

“This time of year, probably three or four times a week,” Weddle explained about how frequently she is on the water.

Weddle says when she paddleboards, she encourages lake visitors to use all of their senses to really plug into their surroundings.

“Whether they’re feeling something, seeing something, hearing something, maybe it’s just something new and different for them,” she started. “Encouraging people to stop and think about all that and pause.”

She uses this mindset herself when paddleboarding. She says she loves animal watching, and seeing beavers is her favorite.

Attentiveness like this is useful when monitoring for animals to report back to the DNR.

WRTV

“Indiana DNR has a history of working with the public on data collection,” explained Andy Byers.

Byers is the Furbearer and Turkey Research Biologist for the Division of Fish and Wildlife and Nature Preserves. He explained how the program got started.

“There was this group of people that’s really passionate about the outdoors and were using Indiana’s waterways to get out and look for wildlife. We wanted to use that to our advantage,” Byers recalled.

Volunteers have been reporting their findings to the DNR with this project since 2020. Last year, paddlers put in more than 2,000 hours of volunteer work.

WRTV

“If I was going to go out and do that by myself, I would have to work 40 hours a week all year, just to collect that much data,” Byers said. “That’s a huge amount of work!”

Volunteers who are already out on the water are acting as the eyes and ears of the DNR to help keep an eye on animal populations.

With this survey, the DNR is specifically interested in 12 animals. They are watching for four mammals: beaver, river otter, muskrat, and mink. There are five birds: bald eagle, great blue heron, osprey, great egret, and kingfisher. There are also three types of turtle: painted turtle, red-eared slider, and Blanding’s turtle.

WRTV

Advertisement

Weddle took WRTV out onto the lake. Along the way, she was quick to point out the birds flying above, the locations where she typically sees beavers, and all the other animals she spotted.

“Today we saw some blue herons and a couple of turtles,” Weddle explained. “Getting people out on the water and in nature is key to my mission, but also to the DNR.”

The data on the postcard (the time spent on the water, the type of animals, and the number of animals) is used by many different departments in the DNR, not just for Byers and his team.

“We want to share this data with the other biologists that work for DNR who can use that for management decisions,” Byers explained. “We’re also sharing that data with property managers around the state so they can kind of see what’s going on with the land they manage.”

Byers shared that there are over 2,700 volunteers with the program all across the state. He said there are hotspots of volunteers in places like Brown, Steuben, and LaGrange Counties.

WRTV

You can participate in this program by sending a postcard from a single trip, or send multiple postcards if you’ll be out paddling multiple times throughout June and July.

You can find a link to volunteer in the Paddlecraft Wildlife Index here.

Once you sign up, the DNR will send you materials to get started, including the postcards that you’ll complete and send back to Byers after your paddle.

Byers is constantly combing through the data provided by volunteers. He hopes that now, in the program’s sixth year, he will be able to start seeing some trends developing.

WRTV

“The goal of this survey is to establish kind of a long-term data set that we can use to look at trends of these species,” Byers explained. “It gives us a really good idea of where in the state people are seeing these different wildlife species.”

Byers is thankful for volunteers like Weddle, and is hopeful that others who love the water will sign up.

“The more people that we have participating, the more data we get, and the more people get to get out and enjoy Indiana’s waterways,” Byers concluded.

Solar farms depend on subsidies. It is hard to justify this corporate welfare while the state and federal governments take away similar benefits from homeowners.

While solar farms might not cross your mind as an issue that can decide elections, their development fills town halls in rural Indiana with angry locals. Tippecanoe and Clark counties passed new restrictions on solar farms this month, while more than 70 other counties have temporary bans, for good reason.

“The locations that solar companies want are in the best agricultural grounds in my district,” state Sen. Jean Leising, R-Oldenburg, told me over the phone. Leising is the chair of the Senate Committee on Agriculture.  “[Some people are] worried about the valuation of their property. Then you have people that are saying, plus, I just don’t want to look at it in my backyard.”

Leising successfully pushed the state to study the loss of prime farmland last year. Indiana has lost 345,000 acres of farmland and over 3,050 farms since 2010. However, the farmland still in use has become more efficient and the state is producing more crops than ever before.

A bigger concern is that commercial-scale solar farms depend on government subsidies and tax abatements. It is hard to justify this corporate welfare while the state and federal governments take away similar benefits from individuals looking to make their homes more self-sufficient. If the state and federal governments are going to invest in solar somewhere, it should be on rooftops, not on Indiana farmland.

The state recently created the ultimate tax abatement for solar farms. Businesses won’t pay any personal property taxes if they have less than $2 million worth of equipment in 2026, and the personal property taxes paid for new equipment can lower to zero as the equipment fully depreciates in value. Some estimates show Indiana solar farms averaged about $50,000 in personal property per acre, meaning they will likely save hundreds of thousands of dollars.

In the same bill, Indiana eliminated a property tax deduction for homeowners whose home values increase after installing solar panels. A study from Zillow showed that homes that installed solar panels increased in value by 4.1%, and the deduction was originally put in place to make sure they weren’t unfairly punished for making their homes more energy efficient.

Not to mention, the state recently eliminated net metering on behalf of energy companies. Rather than receiving full retail rates for excess electricity sent back to the grid, homeowners are now paid at a much lower rate. Meanwhile, new limits on tax credits for solar energy in the federal budget reconciliation bill are predicted to favor large companies that can pass on development costs and make it much harder for homeowners to invest in solar.

Not only do large solar corporations receive unfair advantages at the expense of homeowners, but also they’re getting these benefits despite being less efficient at producing energy.

“Some people say sun is free and wind is free, but they’re not … because there’s a huge transmission cost,” Leising said. “When you site a solar field in the middle of nowhere … then how are you going to get that power to where it needs to go? Right now, we don’t have enough battery storage to store the energy produced when the sun is shining.”

Solar panels on homes, on the other hand, are right next to where most of the energy produced is used.

If there is any benefit to solar energy, it is the possibility of seeing more self-sufficient homes and a more decentralized energy grid, where people aren’t dependent on government-granted monopolies to live their daily lives.

The benefit is almost entirely lost when it becomes another tool in the belts of those monopolies, because there are more efficient, reliable and cleaner forms of energy out there.

Any issue that involves personal property rights is going to be complicated, but when a community’s tax dollars are being stewarded poorly, it should surprise no one to see them mobilize like they have in rural Indiana.

Contact Jacob Stewart at 317-444-4683 or jacob.stewart@indystar.com. Follow him on X and Instagram.

DirecTV’s MySports pack is a curated live TV package geared toward sports fans, with access to local ABC, plus ESPN’s suite of channels, TBS, TNT, USA, FS1 and an included subscription to ESPN+ for $69.99/month.

The MySports pack guarantees access to thousands of live televised events, plus all the live-streaming and library content on ESPN+, all on one interface and one bill. You can try it for free for five days before committing.