(Radio Iowa) – The Iowa D-N-R is moving closing to making some changes in hunting and trapping regulations. The D-N-R’s Chris Ensminger discussed findings from public input meetings during the recent Natural Resources Commission meeting. “For deer, just general comments, we received 427, which is over half of the total comments received for just general comments, 110 for Waterfall, 112 for furbearers. Turkeys received 32 upland 66,” he says. Ensminger says the deer comments focused on some key areas. “Our population is too low, saw too few deer. E-H-D numbers were much higher than reported. People are asking to reduce or eliminate party hunting, reduce or eliminate antlerless tags, limit everyone to one buck, or need a buck only in all gun seasons. And so those six comments, out of 106 unique comments, that represent 42 percent of the total,” Ensminger says.

He also talked about in more detail about the furbearer comments. “Support a bobcat season in additional counties, increase the bag limit for bobcats, increased the otter bag limit, and I would like a bounty program. Those four comments resulted in 60 percent of the program discussions,” he says. Ensminger says the upland comments focused on the population of pheasants and game birds. He says there were also comments about allowing out-of-state hunters. “Eighty percent of the people would like to see us do something different, further regulate non-resident opportunity. Twenty percent would not like to see that. So you can think of that one as about an 80-20 issue,” Ensminger says.

Ensminger says the D-N-R staff will start to look at some rule changes based on the comments. He says they do have some three public meetings scheduled for May 19th through the 21st to get some input on possible changes. “We do have public meetings scheduled for May 19th through the 21st, three meetings, and we will have a kind of more defined proposal that will be taken out to those folks as far as what the core regulations might look like, the core concept would look like, and then we’ll be asking for them, obviously, do they support that still?,” he says. “And what other additional things, you know, do you want to have party hunting as part of those regulations? Do you want to, what do you want to do with the youth season? You know, because we’ve heard people say that, youth should not be impacted by any kind of additional regulations.”

Ensminger says they will be releasing information on antlerless deer licenses in June. He says proposed rule changes would come in July and go into effect in 2026.