SCOTTSBURG —
The state will buy and preserve more than 25,600 acres along the Muscatatuck River in southern Indiana in partnership with the federal government and private conservation groups, Gov. Mitch Daniels said Friday.
The Indiana Department of Natural Resources described the area as holding one of the largest and least-fragmented complexes of bottomland forest remaining in the state, with oak, hickory and sweet gum trees.
“This is one of those opportunities of a decade,” said John Goss, executive director of the Indiana Wildlife Federation and a former state DNR director.
The state will use $21.5 million from a state conservation trust fund and $10 million from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service to begin buying the land in Scott, Jackson and Washington counties, Daniels said.
The announcement was the second in as many days involving huge conservation projects in Indiana. Daniels announced Thursday that the state would acquire a 43,000-acre swath of west-central Indiana flood plains for wetlands preservation in the largest project ever undertaken by the IDNR.
The Muscatatuck Bottoms project will be the second largest. The Nature Conservancy, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service and the Ducks Unlimited conservation group also are providing money for both projects.
“We’re out to create something of lasting and large importance for our state and protect its natural beauty,” Daniels said in announcing the Muscatatuck Bottoms project at Hardy Lake State Recreation Area, about 35 miles north of Louisville, Ky.
He said he wanted Indiana “to become a national leader in wetlands and wildlife protection.”
Muscatatuck Bottoms provides habitat for birds including the least bittern, yellow-crowned night heron, red-shouldered hawk and Cerulean warbler. Two state-endangered reptiles, the Kirtland’s snake and copperbelly watersnake, also are found there, as is featherfoil, a state-endangered plant.
The Wabash project includes 43,000 acres located in the flood plain of the Wabash River and Sugar Creek in west central Indiana. The area, which follows 94 river miles along the Wabash River, stretches across four counties from Shades State Park near Crawfordsville to Fairbanks Landing Fish and Wildlife Area south of Terre Haute.
The state money for the projects is coming from the Lifetime License Trust Fund. It contains revenue from the sale of lifetime fishing, hunting and trapping licenses, which the DNR stopped selling in 2005.
— The Associated Press
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Indiana to buy 25,600 acres along Muscatatuck River in Southern Indiana
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