doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Lead shot increasingly under fire

Understood...you have nothing. Thanks for playing.

If someone is a die hard hunter at heart I don't see a few bucks and little piece of shot stopping them from hunting.

The total ban of lead shot for waterfowl unjust....

If they were going to ban lead shot it should have been in permanent duck blinds where lots of lead shot could accumulate in one spot over the years.

The mobile waterfowler or upland hunter is not going to put enough lead in one spot to make any difference in the world to any creature.

I gave you four concrete examples - my two friends in Jersey, my friend in Maine, myself.

More to the point, though, is how diehard those hunters were. The one Jersey guy, had so many decoys he had no room for oher decor in his house. We hunted brant and sea ducks over his spread of cedar decoys. I assume you know you don't just toss a dozen dekes out there when you hunt brant or sea ducks. Loading those out barely made a dent in the piles in the room he had set aside for decoys (BTW - cedar decoys are much more lifelike than plastic or cork in the way they float.) He had a share in a duck shack - a cabin on stilts out in the marsh. He'd go out there and spend the late season - most of December and January - hunting ducks every day and live there, coming in only for shells, gas, beer and food. (His business was slow in the winter, so he wasn't missing out by living in the marsh all winter.) The other Jersey guy was there when he had a chance, which he made a lot of. They'd go out there in some of the worst weather - sideways snow, fog, waves and wind that threatened to swamp the boat (a Garvey) - and lived for duck season.

Both those guys have quit, in large part because of steel but also because of cost and "all this for one duck" limits.

My friend in Maine I haven't known as long, but he is an avid hunter. He gave up ducks long ago - steel was the issue that pushed him over the edge to quit.

None of these guys' kids have ever hunted ducks, to my knowledge.

So, it's not only the guys who quit. It's the future generations that never start.

Around here, a watchword relative to range safety and neighbor manners is that we are not just worried about our own shooting, but we want our kids and grandkids to be able to shoot, too. The same principle should be applied to waterfowling and, more generally, the whole lead shot issue. The antis failed to take away the guns. But they will not stop trying to end the shooting sports, figuring that if they make it too expensive by requiring expensive ammunition only, they'll turn the guns into expensive paperweights.

Don't help them.

Science on waterfowl is one thing; science on upland birds, something very different. I can provide quotes from two or three state game agencies essentially admitting that the same kind of "good science" that showed ingested lead as a problem for waterfowl does not exist, and probably never will exist, where upland birds are concerned. Although that does not seem to stop them from periodically attempting to add additional nontox restrictions where they don't seem to make much sense.

The raptor rehabilitators will point out that bald eagles, mostly feeding on unrecovered deer shot with lead, are still getting sick and dying from lead poisoning. But we have to remember that we manage wildlife not by what happens to the occasional individual, but by the overall welfare of the SPECIES. And, as a SPECIES, bald eagles have made a miraculous recovery. The lead restrictions we now have in place may or may not have helped, but the lead we're still shooting does not appear to be harming eagles as a SPECIES. And other than maybe doves, in areas where a lot of shells are fired, it does not appear that there is enough shot deposited in any particular area by upland hunters to present the same kind of threat that existed for waterfowl before the lead ban. (And in the pre-ban days, it was also undoubtedly much worse for eagles, given all the scavenging they do around lakes and marshes. With lead shot banned for everything on federal WPA's as well as around wetlands in general in a lot of states, that's doubtless made it much less likely that scavenging eagles would ingest shot from birds killed with lead.)

In the pre-steel days, a major source of lead in eagles was from wounded waterfowl, esp. along the Mississippi River but also in other regions (e.g., eastern KS). Lead from deer carcasses is pretty minor in the way of affecting eagle population dynamics (probably what you mean to imply by "SPECIES") though undoubtedly a few must get lead that way occasionally.

In eastern KS where much/most dove hunting is done over farm ponds and shallow flooded basins, steel shot might make sense. But in Iowa, I have no idea where the predominant hunting habitats will be. I hear about folks planting sunflowers and shooting them, basically over bait fields, but hell, why bother with doves in IA in the first place?

This just keeps on...A few years ago when everyone was wringing their hands and whining about it, I tried through this forum, to organize some"watch groups", so we knew what was actually going on and could try to manage it...The number of volunteers was overwhelming.........NONE...We deserve what we get.....

I know I'll get a lot of hate-mail and venomous responses to this opinion, but here goes.

The primary reason TODAY for lead bans is due to the varmint "hunter" creating a lot of bad press. To a secondary level, it is the big game hunter leaving his gut piles in the field.

The data is in and pretty conclusive in the Western USA as it pertains to raptors getting lead toxicity from bullets. Varminters go out with their lead bullets and slaughter entire prairie dog towns on BLM land, they clean up nothing, they delude themselves into thinking that wholesale slaughter of entire prairie dog towns is some noble land reclamation effort, and then they leave.

In the subsequent days, the raptors ingest the lead and die in fairly substantial numbers.

Those people and also the big game hunters leaving their gut piles are the primary cause of lead bans. There is good data to implicate their practices as destructive to conservation causes.

Now for waterfowl and water supply contamination? That on the other hand is a more dubious ecological argument against lead shot.

The mentality "we must hang together or we'll surely hang apart" is really the wrong way to go with conservation minded hunters concerned about lead. We need to shun the sloppy hunters that are causing problems and we need to reform our cleanup and mitigation practices from within...otherwise the long hand of government will further legislate us and we'll be unable to use lead for anything.

Rook, with the emphasis on "TODAY", I can agree with you. Lead shot bans for waterfowling is about all that was/is needed. I don't know if raptor ingestion of lead in prairie dog towns has an effect on raptor populations or not. Never seen, or looked for any literature on it. Have you? I'd be interested in a few citations if you know of any.

Lead in water supplies is not, never was, an issue.

Lead in Condors from carcasses is an issue. But that is only condors and only so long as their populations are so small.

BrentD,

The impact on raptors collectively is significant. I don't have my data sources handy but the Peregrine Fund (a conservation group founded by hunters/falconers) has studied it and fostered a lot of scientific symposiums to explore the issues.

In short, there are a lot of raptors dying of toxicity, most frequently in Western states that have lots of varmint hunting. The raptors most impacted are Golden Eagles, Bald Eagles, Furruginous Hawks, and other plains species of the genus Buteo.

Vultures and Ravens are also impacted for the same reasons.

Of the about 300 california condors in existence, more than two dozen had high lead levels and some were fatally wounded by lead toxicity from refined, munitions lead attributable to gun hunters. (the lead recovered was refined, had antimony or other alloys in it, etc)

peregrinefund.org has some great info and an xray photo of a deer gut pile. You can't believe how much lead fragmentation occurs. All it takes is a sliver, a few grams of lead, to kill the largest raptor. (keep in mind a large female bald or golden eagle is only 9-11 pounds...doesn't take much lead to kill such an animal)