Dear HCN,
Four things that I wish
you had covered in your story on lead in condors (HCN, 2/18/02:
Condor program laden with lead):
1) The problem
is with deer gut piles left by legal hunting, probably not with
wounded and lost game. Gut piles from legally taken game number in
the hundreds during the hunting season and often are left in open
areas. Lost game is rare and probably crawls back into brush, where
condors aren’t likely to get it.
2) There are two
simple solutions to lead residue in gut piles that can be addressed
today without the need for a new, expensive, tungsten-based bullet.
Either bury the gut piles or shoot bullets that do not leave lead
residue in the gut piles. There are already two bullets on the
market that do not leave lead residue behind.
3)
Hunter groups in Southern California have taken a lead role in
informing and educating their ranks about the dangers of lead to
condors, eagles, vultures and other wildlife. I have written
extensively in Western Outdoor News and my own
publication, California Hog Hunter, about the
lead issue. Turner’s Outdoorsman, a chain of 13 retail stores in
Southern California that cater to hunters, has run information on
its Web site and hands out flyers on the issue prior to and during
deer hunting season. The Tejon Ranch, a 270,000-acre property in
condor country with an extensive hunting program, will be phasing
in the use of what we call “gut-pile safe” ammunition to help
protect its eagles and the foraging condors that are again using
this property.
4) All of the Arizona condors, the
four that died and those that were rescued from the wild to be
chelated for lead poisoning, were all likely poisoned from a single
source that had nothing to do with hunters losing game nor gut
piles left in the field. The condors all picked up lead shot (not
rifle fragments or bullets) from a carcass that has been shot at
least twice with a shotgun (two sizes of shot were found).
Voluntary or regulatory changes in rifle-hunting ammunition would
not have prevented this fluke event.
It would
have been nice for HCN to publish information on
how sportsmen could help solve the lead problem by shooting one of
the two gutpile-safe ammunitions already on the market. Solutions
are better than hand-wringing and
finger-pointing.
Jim
Matthews
San Bernardino,
California
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Condors and bullets.
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