Another potential nail in lead ammo's coffin....

robtattoo

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However......

Please let me be the first to call bull$hit on that.

Bear in mind it's living along the largest concentration of wolves, badgers, bears, lions & corvids in the lower 48, how much carrion containing lead fragments must the thing have had to have eaten in it's life. A bird that is primarily a hunting raptor & not a scavenger, to boot.

Over an average lifespan of 30 years (Google) that single bird must've eaten just about every single carcass shot within 30 miles of Yellowstone AND been unlucky enough to have found every trace of lead, from every bullet.

I'm sorry, but the math simply doesn't work for me.

Further studies have shown that actually consuming the average quantity of lead found in a recovered animal carcass, on a regular basis, has literally ZERO effect on (human) health.

Think about it....the average hunting bullet out west (primarily big .30s & 7s) weighs 180gn, give or take. If a recovered bullet retains 50% of it's mass (low estimate) & 50% of shots are passthroughs (SUPER low estimate...) statistically speaking, the average uncovered mule deer, antelope or elk, weighing a (WAG) average of 300lb therefore contains 45gn of bullet. Call 5gn of that jacket & you've got 40gn of lead.

The average critter is around 50% edible meat, innards & skin.

Therefore the average pound of meat contains 0.0000380952gn of actual lead.

The average golden eagle eats ½ to 1lb of meat per day (Google), split the difference & call that ¾lb, so 0.00002857140gn of lead per day.

At an average lifespan of 10950 days, that's a total of 0.31285683gn of lead in it's entire life. That's 1.75 No.12 shot, to put it in reasonable terms.

A hair under a third of a grain of lead, in it's entire life.

I'm calling a hard "BOLLOCKS" on the whole deal....
 
OP
robtattoo

robtattoo

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OH! OH! OH!!! And as The Wife just pointed ought, that's assuming that eagles don't actually poop!!

Bear in mind that actual lead solids are non digestible, I'm going to go ahead & make the assumption that the stupid eagle actually shat out a good 90% of the lead it ingested!!

I would alter my guess to state that I'd bet it consumed less lead in it's life than is contained in 10 gallons of tap water.
 
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My thoughts exactly when i first read that. (Minus the mathy part that i was putting off till later this evening;) ).
Total crock of crap. Apparently that thing was drinking and bathing in the molten lead streams that so distinctly classify that region.
 
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I'll play devil advocate but Ill start by saying this is a hype piece to something thats been fairly well documented and occurring for some time and because of the location of the bird its going to catch legs and probably start some conversations.

You're right that the majority Goldens don't scavenge but many migrant Goldens do for the sake of ease to get the nutrition they need for the migration. The migration (most likely) started 1-2 weeks ago which would put this in line with that feeding habit. There are way too many assumptions in your calculations. The lead would be concentrated into the wound channel with some particles diverting slightly from it putting the concentration of lead extremely high in those areas and far less in others. All it would need to eat is in and around that wound to get a much higher dose than your calculations. The increased numbers of small lead fragments in carcasses also result in lead being easily ingested because of their larger surface area allow it to be readily absorbed into the blood stream. Their digestive systems are capable of dissolving bone so lead wouldn't be out of the realm of substances of their systems to further break up and absorb. Lead poisoning is much better documented in Bald Eagles which are known scavengers but with the shared habits and biology we can infer the data for lead in the system can be applied to Golden Eagles as well.
 

Wrench

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I'm not well versed in the diet of the golden, but I know that other similar sized birds make fish a good portion of their diets.

Lead and mercury are commonly found in several species of fish.....and let's face it, if there are Eagles around, there's likely a mine or former mine nearby.
 

jmez

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I'm not well versed in the diet of the golden, but I know that other similar sized birds make fish a good portion of their diets.

Lead and mercury are commonly found in several species of fish.....and let's face it, if there are Eagles around, there's likely a mine or former mine nearby.
Doesn't fit the narrative.

Sent from my moto z3 using Tapatalk
 
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Just for the record I'm not agreeing with the article and certainly not agreeing that we need to outlaw lead shot, but I will say that I don't exactly agree with your numbers.

Lead consumption laws were created for the safety of children. The effects of lead on an adult are a distant fraction of what they are on a child. So I would be interested if the study you talk about that exhibited the zero effect on human health was a study on adults or children - I would guess adults. A well documented example is that in adults and children that ingest the same amount of lead, children will absorb about 50% of that lead while adults will absorb about 6%. So is a 30lb bird more like an adult or a child? Well that's another argument that I doubt anyone on here has the proper training in ornithology and physiology to argue - but i think we all have a hunch as to the correct answer.

Now onto the ingestion numbers. A toxic level of lead is 1mg/square centimeter. That is almost nothing. Keep in mind, that is a number developed for human health. Humans with large, high functioning organs, a mouth full of teeth, and bones full of marrow. Now, 99% of lead ingested by adult humans will leave the body as waste within a couple weeks; about 35% will leave as waste in a child. So we're back at the argument on if a bird is more like an adult or a child.

Once lead is absorbed, it travels through blood and through your organs until it can ultimately leave the body as waste or is stored in teeth and/or bones. Keep in mind that birds have hollow bones and really no teeth - no where to store lead. So birds just keep trying to process it. If it cannot be stored or removed from the body and the ingestion remains, obviously this is when lead poisoning happens. We're really not looking over the birds 30 year lifetime, lethal lead exposure and ingestion is often times acute.

I think that the bird died from lead poisoning. Although the possibility of the source being from lead shot is possible, it is remote. As mentioned by others, lead is naturally occurring in a lot of areas in Yellowstone.

You also need to think of where on an animal the bird would eat from. If you had a tiny beak and were trying to eat as much as possible before all the other animals chased you off would you start by ripping fur off the hind quarters or would you start digging into a wound channel. It may eat a pound of meat from the wound channel and be done for the day; meanwhile the wolves have it cleaned up by day 2. It doesn't just spend 200 days eating away at an elk (which is how your numbers lay it out). Just a couple points to ponder as this stuff is extremely complicated. Which is why the claims being made in the article are extremely hard to argue with.
 

BuckSmasher

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Man this is something I have been hearing about but not knowing much about.

I am against lead in my water or my food. So I have been considering switching away from lead until the science is proven. Another thing is I shoot a lot of pigs that I generally leave. I don't want to be irresponsibly poisoning critters.
 

bobr1

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I'm going to preface that I am not for banning lead ammunition and I'm trying to be unbiased. Here are my 2 cents, and I'm by no means an expert but did graduate and do research in biochemistry and I am also a falconer.

It is typically uncommon for most birds of prey including golden eagles to eat carrion (excluding vultures and condors). We normally see this with bald eagles who do it all the time especially in winter if their main source for food (fish) is frozen over. Raptors have a very efficient digestive system in that they normally don't drink water all that much and get the majority of it from their food source. Their slice/mute (droppings) are typically thick and concentrated. Unlike humans where we have a lot of fluid to dilute and excrete chemicals much faster and easier in urine. Anything they can't digest typically is expelled as a pellet (normally fur, feathers and bones) but solid lead would be difficult to expel in a pellet because of the mass.

Also, because they are top of the food chain there is the effect of bioaccumulation which leads to biomagnification. So if the water supply or dirt had minuscule levels of lead in it then the animals eating it are going to start absorbing that in their system at a higher rate and concentrating it more and it keeps repeating the process and goes up the chain until it gets to the primary predators which end up eating the highest concentration. This is why DDT was so bad for birds of prey and didn't have nearly the same negative effect on humans.

However, to directly correlate it to lead bullets, that is something that would require a lot more research and not just a single sample. California condors have had a serious problem with elevated lead in the blood stream or lead poisoning and they only eat carrion. Again whether this is caused exclusively by lead bullet fragments, I don't know.

Also you can't correlate the impact of chemicals on humans directly to other animals as there are so many different things about their environment and their physiology that some things do/don't effect them as much. I worked with a professor who did research on the effects of pharmaceuticals, primarily hormones in the water. It showed that even though it really was not a big concern at the moment for humans the amount present in most of the water supply is changing the sex of fish. And this is just from people either dumping drugs in toilets or them excreting it after taking them for hormone therapy, so an extremely diluted amount.

Other than the major change in the terminal ballistics of a copper bullet there is also the issue of unbound copper which can also accumulate in the body and be toxic as well.

Anyway take this with a grain of salt, just like the article and other research.
 

ChrisS

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Lead isn't nice stuff. Lead uptake in raptors has been studied for quite a while, in the US and in Europe. The physiological response to lead and adsorption rates in birds are also widely studied. You can at least read abstracts, if not the entire articles at the link. In most cases, the answer is lead shot. Uptake can be from bullet fragments in game, waterfowl, and rodents/pests, or prey birds ingesting lead shot as grit*.

Lead is regularly found in raptors at concentrations at exceed a toxicity threshold. That's easy enough to test. Where it comes from is the next guess. Here's an interesting study from 1998:
Use of stable isotope ratios to distinguish sources of lead exposure in wild birds
"We used stable lead (Pb) isotope ratios to attempt to discriminate between several potential sources of elevated environmental Pb exposure in several wild bird species.
...
The range and pattern of the 206Pb:207Pb ratios for Pb-exposed waterfowl and eagles was very similar to that for Pb shot pellets purchased or recovered from lake sediments, consistent with the contention that the ingestion of Pb shot (or Pb sinker in the case of common loons) is the main cause of elevated Pb exposure in these species. "
Isotope ratios are pretty commonly used in the environmental remediation industry to demonstrate who's responsible for cleanup costs for legacy sites. I'm not a wildlife biologist and I'm nowhere near current on research for this over the last 20 years where lead shot for waterfowl has largely been banned. Has it had an affect on lead concentrations in raptors? If not, where is the lead coming from (current isotope ratio comparisons)? Leaded gasoline was largely responsible for general environmental concentrations of lead, but that was banned in the US before lead shot was.

If there are any potential grad students in need of research projects, it seems like this might be a ripe area for studies.

*I investigated a shotgun range in NM a few years ago for the Army Corps and lead shot nearly covered the surface of the entire range. Interestingly, red ants were collecting it and piling it up near their colonies. It was pretty bizarre to see (I'll see if I can find my pictures of it).
 

adkhunter

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Total BS. MSN is not a credible news source.

Don’t remember the article giving details of the necropsy. What was the lead levels in it’s blood? Lead is no where near as toxic as it is made out to be. I suppose it’s not natural for an eagle to die of natural causes...

It’s all about money for the lawyers. Asbestos is no longer a cash cow, lead is the big abatement money maker. Follow the money...
 

Marmots

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Oh boy. Here we go. I do not like arguing on the internet, but I feel the need to speak up here because I believe there are some key points this thread is missing.

An inordinate amount of lead ends up in gut piles, because hunters tend to trim away the entrance and exit wounds they create. Humans don’t like to each bruised and blood-clotted meat, but raptors don’t mind.

Birds of prey have extremely acidic GI tracts which allows them to be able to survive eating the gross stuff they eat. Human stomachs have a pH of 2, and raptor stomachs have a pH close to zero. That’s nearly two hundred times more acidic, as pH is a logarithmic scale measurement. Because of this, lead is much, much more biologically available in raptor stomachs than in those of other animals.

A particularly large female golden eagle is 16 pounds, so those bullet fragments count for a lot more relative to the bird’s body size. A bird that’s been through 30 years of hard knocks usually weighs less than a six-month-old human.

Leads is pretty easy to quantify in the blood of live birds, or the liver and bones of dead birds. Liver biopsy can quantify acute exposure, and bone tissues can quantify chronic exposure because Pb2+ ions are taken into bones in place of Ca2+ ions.

There’s good data out there on how much lead it takes to poison various species of raptor to the point of neurological damage, and to the point of death. This is because back in the 1950s, before the Animal Welfare Act and IACUC committees, it was a pretty easy research paper to get injured raptors, keep them in a lab, and gradually feed them size 12 shot over the course of weeks or months to see what happened.

There are very narrow margins for what is considered a safe amount of lead, and they are small on the same order of the back-of the envelope math starting this thread. Less than 0.2ppm is considered background, 0.2-0.6ppm is sublethal toxicity indicating exposure to lead, and over 0.6 ppm can be considered clinical.

Lead can have sublethal effects. For every bird that dies of outright lead toxicity, there’s likely several others that flew into a wind turbine or failed at hunting and starved because of neurological damage. It would have been nice if the article had elaborated on this more. Did the bird they found have outright lethal levels of lead in it’s tissues, or were the lead levels just high enough that it is the main culprit?

While I don’t doubt that the bird in question was exposed to lead via ammunition, I wish the article would have stated how the researchers came to that conclusion. I know when injured birds are brought into rehab centers they get an X-Ray, and bullet fragments can and do show up in their GI tracts. It’s possible to corroborate acute lead poisoning with high kidney copper concentration to infer that the lead came from a jacketed bullet.

On a longer timeframe, laboratories can differentiate human-sourced lead in bird tissues from background levels because the US currently has no primary lead smelting facilities. Most of the lead in the US was originally mined somewhere else and as a result has a unique isotopic signature.


Long story short, I think lead poisoning of raptors is a legitimate and serious concern. The science is there. On a lighter note, you can check my post history and see that I’m not a greeny weenie, last week I informed someone that former diesel and hydraulic fluid barrels are great for bear baiting if you clean them out by setting them on fire first.

I don’t support banning lead ammunition and think California handled the whole thing very poorly, but I’m all about education and outreach in the matter. Personally, I shoot Barnes out of my centerfire rifles. I’m fine using lead bullets in a muzzleloader because the velocity is so much lower that fragmentation is likely less of a concern. As far as rimfire cartridges go, there is some good copper 22mag on the market but I’ll be the first to state that every nontoxic 22lr I’ve shot was expensive garbage. My target shooting and bear defense loads are certainly still lead.
 
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this buck ingested 180 gr of lead =0.411 oz so .0011676% of its body wt, and it only tool .002721 seconds. I can see it being a BIG problem.
 

sndmn11

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I didn't read the other comments to see if this was mentioned, but I didn't see anything about lead in fishing products being a possibility?
 

Axlrod

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I'ts just a mater of time before the Federal Gov. bans all lead bullets. This Eagle probably did die from lead poisoning but it is the first one i have herd of. This is from that story:
Their numbers in the contiguous 48 U.S. states are steady but not as high as they could be, partly due to collisions with vehicles and wind turbines.

So they build wind farms to save the planet... but the turbines kill raptors!
 

Tod osier

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Oh boy. Here we go. I do not like arguing on the internet, but I feel the need to speak up here because I believe there are some key points this thread is missing.

An inordinate amount of lead ends up in gut piles, because hunters tend to trim away the entrance and exit wounds they create. Humans don’t like to each bruised and blood-clotted meat, but raptors don’t mind.

Birds of prey have extremely acidic GI tracts which allows them to be able to survive eating the gross stuff they eat. Human stomachs have a pH of 2, and raptor stomachs have a pH close to zero. That’s nearly two hundred times more acidic, as pH is a logarithmic scale measurement. Because of this, lead is much, much more biologically available in raptor stomachs than in those of other animals.

A particularly large female golden eagle is 16 pounds, so those bullet fragments count for a lot more relative to the bird’s body size. A bird that’s been through 30 years of hard knocks usually weighs less than a six-month-old human.

Leads is pretty easy to quantify in the blood of live birds, or the liver and bones of dead birds. Liver biopsy can quantify acute exposure, and bone tissues can quantify chronic exposure because Pb2+ ions are taken into bones in place of Ca2+ ions.

There’s good data out there on how much lead it takes to poison various species of raptor to the point of neurological damage, and to the point of death. This is because back in the 1950s, before the Animal Welfare Act and IACUC committees, it was a pretty easy research paper to get injured raptors, keep them in a lab, and gradually feed them size 12 shot over the course of weeks or months to see what happened.

There are very narrow margins for what is considered a safe amount of lead, and they are small on the same order of the back-of the envelope math starting this thread. Less than 0.2ppm is considered background, 0.2-0.6ppm is sublethal toxicity indicating exposure to lead, and over 0.6 ppm can be considered clinical.

Lead can have sublethal effects. For every bird that dies of outright lead toxicity, there’s likely several others that flew into a wind turbine or failed at hunting and starved because of neurological damage. It would have been nice if the article had elaborated on this more. Did the bird they found have outright lethal levels of lead in it’s tissues, or were the lead levels just high enough that it is the main culprit?

While I don’t doubt that the bird in question was exposed to lead via ammunition, I wish the article would have stated how the researchers came to that conclusion. I know when injured birds are brought into rehab centers they get an X-Ray, and bullet fragments can and do show up in their GI tracts. It’s possible to corroborate acute lead poisoning with high kidney copper concentration to infer that the lead came from a jacketed bullet.

On a longer timeframe, laboratories can differentiate human-sourced lead in bird tissues from background levels because the US currently has no primary lead smelting facilities. Most of the lead in the US was originally mined somewhere else and as a result has a unique isotopic signature.


Long story short, I think lead poisoning of raptors is a legitimate and serious concern. The science is there. On a lighter note, you can check my post history and see that I’m not a greeny weenie, last week I informed someone that former diesel and hydraulic fluid barrels are great for bear baiting if you clean them out by setting them on fire first.

I don’t support banning lead ammunition and think California handled the whole thing very poorly, but I’m all about education and outreach in the matter. Personally, I shoot Barnes out of my centerfire rifles. I’m fine using lead bullets in a muzzleloader because the velocity is so much lower that fragmentation is likely less of a concern. As far as rimfire cartridges go, there is some good copper 22mag on the market but I’ll be the first to state that every nontoxic 22lr I’ve shot was expensive garbage. My target shooting and bear defense loads are certainly still lead.

This is solid information, thanks for taking the time. I’ll also add that a birds gizzard has the ability to macerate the lead. When we eat lead, it goes right through us with only a tiny bit of the surface dissolved and absorbed, that is why so many of us have eaten lead pellets and not died. A bird can grind up the lead in the gizzard (akin to you chewing up a pellet in your mouth to powder, which we obviously don’t do) and the resulting ground up lead is much more readily absorbed.

There is a lot known about raptors and lead and it is a serious issue.
 
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