Very informative, J.W. . As for the gut pile, how would the lead get there, unless the animal, in question was gut shot? I would think the gut pile would be fine, for the scavengers. The lungs, yeah, bury those, but unless the animal was gut shot, I don't see how lead would be there. As for ducks eating lead, the only ones, that would be likely to eat, lead, would be the diving ducks, and not the non diving, like Mallard, teal, canvas back, golden eye, etc..
Kinda hard to shoot solid copper, out of a muzzle loader, and the wear on rifles, is greater, as there is no give, as in a lead core, bullet.
Personally, I really don't want to shoot solid copper out of my rifle.
Yeah, the Condor, deserves to at least get a chance to survive in a much changed world, but I just don't see there being that much lead available to be eaten by them, before something else gets the "lost" game. Just my opinion.
Wayne
I have yet to see someone separately pile the contents of the gut cavity and the pneumo-thoracic cavity, even though in mammals they are two separate chambers. So, we use the generic term gutpile for the "innards". Whether it is a gutshot deer or one hit in the boiler room. High resolution digital x-rays are showing that the lead fragments are traveling further than anticipated and can appear in the liver, stomach, etc in some shots. When I come to bury the gutpile, I am not going to pick and choose, it's all going in together. Once my bullet/roundball stops moving, I do not want it killing anymore.
Per conversation with representatives at Barnes, a solid copper round does not cause any more wear to a steel barrel than a jacketed bullet.
If you don't want to shoot copper, don't. But then please consider burying the gutpile. Or (ew) bagging it up and bringing it out!
I am questioning whether it was really good science in the first place that we see so often.
In science, publish or die. When you publish a paper, it goes into a journal or other publication that then is distributed to other people in your field. You publish what you intend to research, the methodology for your research, then the details of what you learned from the research, and your conclusion. It's wide open, you gotta support your claims. And the way you "make your bones" in science is to disprove someone else's research or else publish findings that no one can bust. And it is bloody cut-throat. If these thousands and thousands of papers published were weak, they would have been cut to ribbons, and not by just someone saying they disagree. That does not cut it. To bust someone's work, you have to point out step by step where they went wrong and how their conclusion is flawed. That's why they call it "peer reviewed". Kinda like when we post pics of the bows at full draw. Anyone can run a plank thru a bandsaw, slap a snakeskin on it, and call it a bow....until you draw it, hehehe!
Hoping this is not taken as a seed to veer off into politics, but someone is gonna bring it up, so I will. There are those that will make claims that this is all a thinly veiled attempt to ban all ammunition as a backdoor way to eliminate guns.
To that I answer, yes, the anti-hunting extremists are certainly doing that. However, WE HUNTERS are the original conservationists. WE lobbied Washington DC for taxes on our activities in order to fund conservation efforts. WE lobbied for national parks, wildlife refuges, limited seasons, limits on how many of a species we could take and what species we could take, and so on. Without the waterfowl conservation stamp, the once believed extinct giant Canada goose would have not had the funding to take a couple dozen breeding pairs held by private citizens to a reintroduction success story without compare!
This world is not the same as when Teddy Roosevelt shot hundreds of big game animals in a few weeks on a killing spree across Wyoming when he learned his wife and mother died the same day. Nor is it the same as when he came to his senses and saw a sea of carcasses in his wake and realized the unlimited west was a myth. We don't have the miles and miles of prairie dog towns and fat sage grouse here in the Dakotas and Montana that fed the bald eagles in winters past. As their populations recovered, we think they replaced those normal feeding strategies with their Ace in the hole...scavenging. And the record high populations of the whitetail deer we now have and the number of deer hunters, this is a new situation altogether. So, what do we as conservationists do? We learn from the past. We learned we can hunt AND conserve.
