doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Lead Shot Ban in Montana

Ben, you keep tapdancing around my question, which is a fairly simple one: WHAT KILLED THOSE CHUKAR THAT WERE FOUND TO HAVE LEAD IN THEIR GIZZARDS? If you tell me that they were simply found dead and that the lead in their gizzards was determined to be the cause of their deaths, you're going to both surprise and impress me. However, I'm guessing that--like the Iowa pheasants that were shot and found to carry bird flu antibodies (which means the bird flu didn't kill them, and examination indicated they were in a healthy, unweakened state), those chukar were probably shot also. Did examination show them to be emaciated or otherwise weakened due to the presence of lead in their gizzards? Or were they healthy? In order to prove that ingestion of lead pellets at a very low level kills birds, you have to come up with birds that have actually DIED from something like a single lead pellet in their gizzards--not from some other cause.

As for any reports about eagles CURRENTLY endangered due to lead shot, the following appeared in the Des Moines Register about a year ago, with the Iowa eagle statistics provided by the DNR:

"In the 1960's, largely because of the pesticide DDT, there were only about 500 pairs of bald eagles in the entire United States. Iowa's eagle population began rebounding in 1977 with a single nesting pair. By 1984, there were still only two."

"Currently, the state has 167 documented pairs of nesting eagles (estimates are closer to 200), said Pat Schlarbaum, a wildlife technician with the DNR."

"The most recent midwinter survey, he said, counted about 3,000 bald eagles in Iowa, including a cluster in downtown Des Moines."

I'd add that the same article includes comments from wildlife rehabilitators that they're seeing "a growing number of eagles brought to them with lead poisoning they think is being caused by eagles consuming the carcasses of dead deer that have crossed the paths of hunters."

One commented that "We have X-rays of lead shrapnel in eagle bellies and we've X-rayed deer carcasses that have the same sort of fragments."

Leaving the "shrapnel" comment aside . . . well, yeah. When you have a hundred times more nesting pairs of eagles than we had 25 years ago, and when we have more eagles in Iowa in the winter than there were in the ENTIRE COUNTRY in the 1960's (and winter happens to coincide with gun deer season in Iowa), no surprise that more will show up sick or injured, for whatever reason. But how worried about eagles should we be, when their population has increased to that extent? It's not like the ones dying from lead poisoning are threatening the eagle population--which seems to continue to grow. Looks like the elimination of DDT, and perhaps going nontox for waterfowl, has solved whatever problem the eagles were facing in the not too distant past. The eagle recovery, in spite of lead bullets and lead shot in the uplands, is nothing short of miraculous.

The way wildlife science works is this: You only worry about individual animals if the population is threatened or endangered. If it's not, and especially if the population is in fact increasing, then you no longer focus on individual fatalities. What's key is the welfare of the SPECIES, not of the INDIVIDUAL. Otherwise, we're treating all eagles like pets. And if we expand that to species we hunt . . . well then, I guess we shouldn't hunt them, because we kill some of them and take them home with us, and others end up running or flying off crippled and dying later. But as long as hunting is not harming the overall status of the species as a whole, we don't worry about it. Why treat eagles (or any other species) differently? That would run counter to the very core of wildlife science, which focuses on the welfare of the species rather than of the individual animal.