Eagles? Tell me it ain't so, Ben! They were used as a "poster bird" when we banned lead shot for waterfowl. And guess what? It WORKED! Eagles have made a remarkable recovery, likely helped by both the lead shot ban on waterfowl (eagles tend to hang around water a lot, and eat a lot of carrion) and banning DDT. Assuming they were once threatened by secondary ingestion of lead when they ate unrecovered waterfowl, they're clearly not threatened now. We're seeing them all over here in Iowa, in places where eagles hadn't been seen for decades. And we're seeing far more of them in places where they have always gathered, like along the Mississippi River and around our large reservoirs.

Noted ballistician Tom Roster did a study using steel shot on pheasants. His shooters were experienced hunters with good dogs, and the test was conducted on preserve pheasants--which almost anyone with experience hunting both wild and preserve birds will tell you are far easier to put in the bag than wild birds. They ended up with a wounding loss rate of over 12%. I've kept very careful records for a very long time. I don't claim to be a world class shot, but my wounding loss rate on pheasants, wild birds only, shooting lead shot, is less than half that figure. Roster, who's examined hundreds (if not thousands) of waterfowl killed with steel, also noticed that there's more of a feather balling problem with pheasants than with ducks. So . . . since MT FWP says that lead shot in low use situations (that'd be pretty much all upland hunting, except perhaps doves on public areas) isn't an environmental concern, are we going to end up with more birds that are wounded and unrecovered with steel than the few we might save that would die from ingesting lead?

Interesting that the MN Nontoxic Shot Advisory Committee and MT FWP must not consider the "science" you reference to be germaine to the subject of a lead shot ban on upland birds. Can you explain why that is?