I can't improve on Doc Drew's response: blaming inconvenient science on corrupt scientists or commie plots just reveals ignorance of how science works. There were years of study all pointing to the same conclusion on ingested shot killing waterfowl; if that research was all wrong, please show us the studies proving it.

I first encountered the issue in 1968, talking to an old warden on Sauvie Island outside Portland. He told me of finding hundreds of 'green-asses' every year, dead or dying ducks with their vents stained green from undigested food dribbling out because ingested lead bound digestive enzymes. They simply starved. Observations like this go much farther back and finally led to the research at the USFWS wildlife toxicology lab at Patuxent which eventually led to the lead ban.

And yes, lead shot does sink into the mud and become unavailable to birds picking up grit from the bottom - you don't find green-asses anymore.

Every condor in California is trapped annually and put through a dialysis-like procedure to remove lead from their blood, the lead coming from gut piles and ground squirrels shot with .22's. This is very expensive and personnel-intensive but the birds would die out otherwise.

The main reason that there are more raptors today is that they have recovered from the DDT era, during which bird and fish eating species nearly went extinct due to DDT thinning their eggshells. Like lead sinking under mud, DDT is disappearing from the environment in North American and Europe after the ban and the birds have recovered, but it is still a huge problem in the tropics, where it is widely used, and for northern birds which winter in the tropics.

As to saying that other things like wind turbines kill eagles and everything else that flies, yes they absolutely do, which is why I favor nuclear power over wind, or covering much of the US with solar farms. But adding to that mortality with lead poisoning doesn't negate the impact of either - mortality is additive. That's like the cat-lovers saying that window strikes, poisoning, and predators also kill songbirds so why worry about the billions killed by cats?

Wildlife numbers worldwide are plummeting at a terrifying rate, for any number of human-related causes. It is up to us to resolve as many of those factors as possible, not point to some as reasons to ignore or justify others. We are destroying Creation for our own convenience.