How to do a link? Well, if you can't do it any other way, simply look at the address of the website you've accessed and type it in.
www.doublegunshop.com. That's all you have to do. Click on that and it will get you right back to this place.
I took a look at the brief item about shooting estates in Great Britain. Note how the gizzards were collected: "From birds that were shot . . . " That means they were quite healthy. The way the game is played on driven shoots, you don't shoot birds so sick they can't get off the ground, and you don't shoot them if they can scarcely fly because you might strike a beater, and you don't shoot low birds because it's not sporting--even if they are surrounded by sky (blue sky rule prevails over there, for the safety of the beaters). So these were HEALTHY birds. Which would seem to indicate that however much lead shot they ingested--and 3% of the gizzards out of 437 birds isn't a whole lot--it had yet to make them sick enough that they were not "sporting" targets to be shot by the guns. And if that's a typical rate of shot ingestion on British estates, then it reinforces my view that we have little or nothing to worry about in this country. Since, as I pointed out, those birds are exposed to far heavier shot fall than you're ever going to see when hunting pheasants in this country, other than where there are "released" birds.
I don't know how their bone lead level compares to that which was apparently fatal in waterfowl. But as I mentioned earlier, since woodcock were healthy and shot with bone lead levels that were considered fatal in waterfowl, that would seem to suggest that different species have different levels of tolerance for lead. With woodcock being significantly smaller than ducks, logic would seem to indicate that if it's enough to kill a duck, then it will surely kill a woodcock. But that does not appear to be the case. And perhaps pheasants--birds of a similar size to ducks--also have a greater tolerance for lead. But I see nothing in the article to tell me that just because a small percentage of pheasants are ingesting lead, apparently with no ill effects, that the same would hold true for waterfowl. Perhaps the researchers need to contact a bunch of gamekeepers and ask them to save any pheasants they find dead without any apparent evidence of trauma either before the shooting season starts or after it ends. Then necropsy and analyze the birds to see what their bone lead levels show, and whether lead poisoning might be a possible cause of death. If I go over again next season, I'll have to ask the keepers and the man who runs the shoot whether they're losing many birds during the off season for causes they can't tie to predators or anything else that's obvious.
I note that the article contains several references I used when I did my articles on lead shot: The Tall Timbers research and the article on woodcock in Wisconsin.
Last edited by L. Brown; 02/05/16 05:07 PM.
