Way back a bunch of pages, you mentioned that lead levels of 5 point something can be found in eagles, and .2 ppm is considered toxic. I'm confident that you're aware of 'studies' that show normal acting and appearing pheasant can have bone lead levels in the mid four hundreds ppm. Are you going to insist that the only source of that lead came from expended lead shot?
Craig, we need to avoid apples and oranges comparisons....
....The abstract says: "Bone lead concentrations considered to be toxic in waterfowl were observed in all age classes of woodcock." The woodcock for this study (other than a few chicks) were harvested using steel shot before the regular season opened. So obviously, they were relatively healthy when they were "collected"....
....I've never been terribly concerned about lead shot ingestion by pheasants. However they were exposed to lead, based on the Tall Timbers research on quail taken off an area of much heavier shot fall than one typically sees in upland hunting, I'd doubt that any appreciable part of that exposure came from ingesting lead shot.
Larry, your woodcock abstract should point out that you choose to state 'obviously they were relatively healthy'. What you fail to admit, is that there is enough environmental non shot sourced lead to be measurable in woodcock. I agree that woodcock can not be compared to ducks, but in close proximity to duck habitat, you say steel shot zone, there is enough environmental lead available to be toxic to a duck.
Back to apples and oranges, can you blame someone for questioning your contention that all available lead necessarily comes from shot. I pointed out numbers, because while you may split hairs about apples and oranges, the very presence of measurable won't go well for your case.
All I was asking is that if a study comes up concluding x or y, are you just going to agree that it was caused by lead shot. And, please don't hope for a moment that there aren't 'studies' that implicate ingested lead shot in pheasant lead levels, as I've been hinting about repeatedly.
