Craig - I'm not sure why you refer to third hand anecdotes, as I was just illustrating the fact that lead poisoning has been recognized for a long time, going back long before I learned about it from a game warden in 1968. The USFWS, state wildlife agencies, foreign wildlife agencies, and universities spent tens of millions of dollars over decades studying the issue and the evidence was overwhelming. If you are intersted in the data, not anecdotes, have a look through articles here: http://www.peregrinefund.org/subsites/conference-lead/2008PbConf_Proceedings.htm

Lead is still an issue for scavenging raptors - to keep the population going, every wild condor in California is trapped annually and its blood put through a dialysis-like process to remove lead ingested from gut piles, lost game, and ground squirrels shot with .22's.

Lead ingested from game is also an issue for humans - see some of the articles on that website. A close friend is one of the country's premier game bird biologists and a very serious deer and pig hunter. He and his wife subsist on game, and he switched to copper bullets years ago because standard expanding bullets deposit a cloud of lead in tissue well beyond the wound channel. I am not happy that California is banning lead for most game, but it is the right thing to do, for both wildlife and humans.

DDT and related compounds were banned for nearly all uses in the US in 1972 but persists in the environment and is still widely used in third world countries. North American raptors and shorebirds which migrate to Central and South America pick up heavy doses in their wintering grounds. Studies of eggs in research collections showed that the eggshell thinning which causes reproductive failure in birds started in the 1940's, right after DDT was introduced. In Europe and North America, shells became gradually thicker after the ban and as result fish-eating birds are again abundant and we have peregrines nesting in our cities. Again, the evidence was incontrovertible, not anecdotal.