- Location
- The Conservative part of Ontario
Picked this up off a US forum:
Last thursday the lead article on the front page of the San Jose Mercury News outlined a recommendation by California Dept. of Fish and Game to ban the use of all lead in ammuntion used for hunting across about a third of the state. The area proposed runs from San Francisco and Modesto in the north to Bakersfield and Los Angeles in the south. This is the range of the Ca. condor, a species near extinction twenty years ago that now consists of 279. This is also the range of the best wild hog habitat and some pretty decent pockets of blacktail range. Seems the condors suffer lead poisoning due to feeding off gutpiles and unrecovered kills. Bullet fragments from lead in softpoint rifle bullets are the culprit.
There is no argument with the science behind this. The lead poisoning of condors is real and they have isotope-scanned blood samples from condors matching various types of lead used in different bullets. That's not the part of this unfolding tale I have a problem with. The problem I have is with the many millions of dollars spent over the last twenty years trying to save a species that was marginal when the Gold Rush started in 1849. Now that all that money has been spent on captive rearing, tagging, reintroduction and tracking there is a cadre of biologists and others heavily involved in this venture to the ongoing tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. Condors are impressive birds, but basically just oversized turkey vultures. As a matter of fact, turkey vultures were filling the nitch the condors were vacating on the evolutionary ladder. And nobody was worried about how much lead they were picking up from hunters gutpiles. With the blessing of CDFG, the law will probably pass. Looks like I will be investing in some Barnes Triple Shocks. What a pain in the butt!
Last thursday the lead article on the front page of the San Jose Mercury News outlined a recommendation by California Dept. of Fish and Game to ban the use of all lead in ammuntion used for hunting across about a third of the state. The area proposed runs from San Francisco and Modesto in the north to Bakersfield and Los Angeles in the south. This is the range of the Ca. condor, a species near extinction twenty years ago that now consists of 279. This is also the range of the best wild hog habitat and some pretty decent pockets of blacktail range. Seems the condors suffer lead poisoning due to feeding off gutpiles and unrecovered kills. Bullet fragments from lead in softpoint rifle bullets are the culprit.
There is no argument with the science behind this. The lead poisoning of condors is real and they have isotope-scanned blood samples from condors matching various types of lead used in different bullets. That's not the part of this unfolding tale I have a problem with. The problem I have is with the many millions of dollars spent over the last twenty years trying to save a species that was marginal when the Gold Rush started in 1849. Now that all that money has been spent on captive rearing, tagging, reintroduction and tracking there is a cadre of biologists and others heavily involved in this venture to the ongoing tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. Condors are impressive birds, but basically just oversized turkey vultures. As a matter of fact, turkey vultures were filling the nitch the condors were vacating on the evolutionary ladder. And nobody was worried about how much lead they were picking up from hunters gutpiles. With the blessing of CDFG, the law will probably pass. Looks like I will be investing in some Barnes Triple Shocks. What a pain in the butt!
