New study on lead fragments from shot in game birds

[David Borrowman]

Our friends in the UK put this together. I don't think there is much to worry about unless you eat one or more wild bird meal/day. I had no idea lead pellets fragmented so much. The X-ray photo of the wood pigeon is very eye opening.


http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0010315

[Peter Clark]

This is very timely if somewhat off topic. Tonight we were eating an elk roast from one I killed during the 2008 season. Trying to rotate our freezer contents you know. Low and behold I bit down on something that clearly wasn't bone and pulled the following out of my mouth.
Yes, it's a 140 grain Nosler accubond. Notice the great weight retention! I was trying to remember the exit wound and couldn't. No wonder. :eek:
Second picture is the beast.

[Bill Murphy]

I didn't even bother to read the ridiculous implication that we, who don't grind our food in gizzards, are harmed by lead from game. Peter, thanks for giving this left wing attempt to end hunting as we know it a good example of "ridiculous". Whenever I bite down on a 140 grain Nosler, I, like you, generally spit it out.

[Dean Romig]

Yeah, I ingested a lead sinker last year while eating a loon but was lucky enough to pass it the next day....

[Dave Suponski]

Sooo,Thats why you were so cranky last year....That would explain it....Can we call ya "Ol Lead Butt" now :biglaugh:

[Dean Romig]

Now that hurt...

[Jack Cronkhite]

I have eaten a lot of game meat, big, small and lots of birds. But, loon........ What is your recipe for that??

As for lead, I remove all I can see in the initial dressing, excise the wound channel and spit out an occasional missed pellet when enjoying the meal. I suppose I may have swallowed some lead in life. Not yet exhibiting any symptoms of lead poisoning nor am I about to start worrying over it. Have outlived contemporaries who wouldn't have ever dreamed about eating shot game, enjoying a single malt or crossing the street, other than at a corner.

I do what I can to mitigate risk but I'm a fatalist. When my time comes, it will be because it is my time. If my demise is linked to decades of hunting, well the quarry got its revenge but I had a good time along the way.

Cheers,
Jack

[Dean Romig]

With a grain of salt Jack.

I was merely attempting to raise the issue once again, tongue in cheek this time, that alarmists can get what they want if we're not vigilant. Lead sinkers and other fishing apparatus made of lead has been banned because "scientists" found (or planted) lead sinkers in a loon or two and said it was an epidemic. Why is this a recent 'plague' when it hasn't been an issue for over two-hundred years but just the last ten years or so?

Your position is well stated Jack.

[calvin humburg]

You know, life causes death. Being a western kansas carp fisherman i'll say I don't care for the new hard weights. Yeah I have a can of worms can of corn and sometimes use a bober.(-: ch

[Dave Suponski]

Well said Jack thanks....:)

[Robin Lewis]

What alarmists don't seem to understand is that we all are walking a path that has the same destination (heaven or hell). I suspect that the hunters and fisherman tend to enjoy the stroll down this path more that any alarmist. They need to learn to enjoy life and worry less about the path ending because it IS going to end.

[David Borrowman]

My apologies. I should have titled the post "New UK study on how to ban all lead shot and then hunting". However, I do think the article is interesting from a ballistic point of view.

If we were really worried about dying I don't think we would be shooting 100+ year old shotguns.

DB

[Dean Romig]

.

If we were really worried about dying I don't think we would be shooting 100+ year old shotguns.

DB

Now wait just a daggoned minute.... are you sayin' these old guns are dangerous?? :eek:

[David Borrowman]

Dean,

I was just agreeing with everyone else that hunters/outdoorsmen push the envelope more than the average person in order to get the most enjoyment out of life. I would venture a guess that many of us that enjoy shooting Parkers do it not only for the enjoyment of shooting a quality piece of American history, but also for the thrill of trusting that quality after 100+ years. I'll be experiencing that thrill tonight during a round of sporting clays with my Damascus bbls.

DB

[Dean Romig]

Good Man David!

We all shoot them because we enjoy it but mostly because we can with the utmost confidence - much to the horror of the uneducated :cool:

[Jack Cronkhite]

The uneducated are oft' horrified. Many alarmists focus on the small picture to spread panic. For instance, all the worry over west nile virus, bird flu, chronic wasting disease and renewed concerns over lead as a few examples. Take any of those "small stuff" issues and research the fatal outcomes world wide. Then compare that outcome to fatalities resulting from something as well known as drunk driving (totally preventable). Qualifies as a jaw dropper if you never considered it. Another alarmist focus is on the individual versus the species. It would be sad to see a dead loon with an ingested lead sinker and call for an immediate ban on such a deadly product. The loon, as a species, is doing well. Now let's consider a big picture species level issue such as the current Gulf of Mexico oil contamination. There will be a drastic outcome for many individual life forms and there is also a potential species level disaster for the brown pelican, only just removed from the endangered list. But we humans aren't about to give up on oil. Now I don't want to be alarmist, but that little incident may kill more individual living creatures than the last century of sport (i.e. non-commercial) hunting and fishing has. Of course I can't provide the numbers, so I guess I could be held out to be offering mere conjecture as rebuttal for the proven dead loons rationale - sorry.

I did read the UK article and it did not deter me from eating game. A few scientific weasle words used and there was no effort taken to remove any pellets, just cook them all. Then, you had to replace all meat meals with just shot game and on and on. Now there was one pheasant in the study that was tenderized in the field. The average number of pellets per pheasant was 3+ but one bird had 18 pellets - 10 yards full choke??. But who would cook 18 known pellets. That skews the results somewhat, as well as not removing pellets as a first step skews the entire study somewhat.

I will do a small study in a few weeks. Since I have some routine blood tests due, I asked the doctor to add lead testing, given the concerns out there and that I have eaten so much game in my life. If I can remember, I'll give a report.

Cheers,
Jack

[Dean Romig]

Waiting for your report... if it ever comes :rolleyes:

[Destry L. Hoffard]

Dean,

How do you fix them loons? All the recipies I've tried didn't come out to well.

DLH

[Dean Romig]

Destry, like I told Jack, "With a grain of salt." ;)

[calvin humburg]

With a grain of salt, cooked on a shingle perhaps?

[Dean Romig]

Yup.

[james van blaricum]

If you will shoot them in the head you won't have the problem

[Peter Clark]

We've probably overworked this one, but I think I was in more danger from cutting myself on the remainder of the copper jacket on that Nosler than from swallowing the lead. I think, even at age 60, my innards still function well enough to expel the lead! I am also still nimble enough of tongue to find just about anything size 8 or larger before I swallow it. Can't say about #9 as I haven't used them for awhile.
In AZ they require copper bullets around the Grand Canyon to save the introduced California condos from lead poisoning. I guess I'd be more concerned about their starving to death considering they evolved dining on ground sloths and mammoths, not puny mule deer.

[Peter Clark]

Make that Condors!

[Richard Flanders]

Interesting thread and something of interest to anyone who eats a lot of birds I'd say. After a meal of wild bird I don't go to sleep at night fraught with fear of bodily harm but I definitely try to NOT ingest shot. Stomach acid has a low pH and will readily dissolve shot and put lead into the system and it doesn't take much to be harmful from what I understand.... which isn't THAT much of course. I have a copy of a study that a roommate did on duck ingestion of lead which has pictures of their livers... NOT pretty I assure you. They really grind it up in their gizzard of course... THAT's not pretty either as they really break pellets down. Anyone ever had a hair test done for lead? I've considered it just for grins. A neighbor has high Pb contents in his blood from working in a local industrial shop and is essentially disabled as a result and is doing some sort of scavenging therapy which is supposedly working to some degree. Hard to imagine that bullet survived the butchering in that elk! I've got the .45-90 bullets I've pulled from my moose on the shelf here. Their wound channel is not hard to trace for sure but most just go straight through and are not recovered, even out to 250yds.

[Dean Romig]

It sure is comforting to know that Christmas tree tinsel is no longer made of lead foil... nor are the toothpaste tubes we used to suck on just to get the toothpaste smell on our breath so we could prove to our parents that we indeed had brushed our teeth... not to mention the airplane glue we used to sniff came in lead tubes too. No more lead pipes either supplying us with drinking water... no more lead in the solder we use to sweat copper pipes... no more lead in the paint used for domestic purposes. As a toddler I used to chew on the painted windowsills in our old farmhouse and on my crib too because the paint I could chip off with my new front teeth tasted so sweet (could only have been the lead in that old paint).

Have any of us been adversely affected by all this lead? I don't think so, but then maybe my thought processes aren't what they could have been :vconfused:

[Richard Flanders]

Hmmm... speaking of faulty judgment and thought processes Dean, perhaps all that lead is what causes the financially and socially deadly Parker disease?? I guess it's up the Chinese to make sure we get our Pb allocation from here forward.......

[james van blaricum]

richard, what is that grey cowling on your plane. Is that put on to protect the engine? Also
I understand that landing a plane with skis on snow is difficult because you don't have any
depth perception, is that true? I have a lot of hours in a skylane but landings were always on
concret, grass etc. jvb

[calvin humburg]

Yeah that lead tinsel made the best balls to through at my sister. Oh what about all that mecury in my mouth. ummmm. ch I think maybe thats to keep the motor warm?

[Richard Flanders]

James: It's an insulated engine cover that keeps the engine warm so you can start it again. If you let it get too cold while you're out playing, it's hard on the engine to restart it as it has a splash oil system for lubricating the cam lobes. I generally preheat the engine with a small electric heater inside the covered cowling overnight if it's real cold. The cover used to be black but UV fixed that.

Depth perception while landing on skis depends upon the lighting. On cloudy days the light is flat on snow and perception is bad so we sometimes make a low and slow pass on a landing site and toss out a string of spruce boughs... or sleeping bags, water bottles, parkas, or whatever is in the plane so we have some reference. On nice sunny days ski landings are the easiest of all and resemble a flat water landing on floats; you just fly it into the snow at a slow descent rate until it is on the ground...

[Dave Suponski]

Rich,Very ingenious! Thanks for explaining that....:)

[Fred Preston]

I have heard that the cold weather bushies would drain the hot oil in couple of jugs for an overnighter and take them to bed with them. Probably no squaws available.

[Richard Flanders]

When I'm going to be out in some really remote location where it's not below about -10F and will need to preheat somehow I drain my engine oil into two 1-gal Coleman fuel cans and store them inside the cabin or wall tent. On departure day I crack the can lids a touch and put them on the wood stove until I can just barely keep my hands on the cans, which would be about 200deg, then run out dump it in quickly, hand prop it over 50times with the mixture pulled, then give it gas and hand prop it to start it. This is the "old" way of doing it and is still the very best. I am the only pilot that I know of that still uses this tried and true method. At least you get the cam and crankshaft journals and the wrist pins lubed before startup. If it's below -10deg I drain the oil and use a Red Dragon propane-fired heater to preheat the whole engine. This is essential when it's -30 or -40 for sure. Below -40 and it has to be pretty essential for me to be somewhere for me to even think of starting the plane. Going to look for an overdue pilot friend in the middle of the night in mid winter comes to mind for one time I did it. He was stuck on a glacier at 7000'. They couldn't take off due to deep snow and spent so much time packing a strip with skis that his engine was way too cold to start. We found him and radioed in to the rescue coord center that he was ok and I flew in a Red Dragon the following day and we got him going. Others use everything from MSR or single-burner coleman stoves to catalytic heaters for preheating. Extreme cold weather flying is a real project.

[james van blaricum]

Thanks Richard, That is quite a procedure,inKansas it never gets that cold and I don't think I could prop a skylane anyway. jvb

[calvin humburg]

30 or 40 below thats scary cold, make a memory out of a person pretty fast.

[Richard Flanders]

You can prop a skylane but it's scary. Lots of horsepower there. I had to hand prop a C-180 when the owner and I got stuck on a remote glacier below Mt McKinley in very bad weather and were overdue on our flight plan. The alert was out and we killed the battery listening to prognostications as to our doom on the radio chatter between airliners above but no one could hear us. When the weather cleared enough for us to fly after 2 days there the battery was kaput so I propped it to life. One mis-step on the snow and you'd look like a badly processed swiss steak or a gory victim on CSI Miami for sure.... who got me started on these flying stories???

[calvin humburg]

Don't matter they are good to read. Weather put you on the glacier. Oh, that must of been before all the glaciers melted because of global warming(-: ch

[Bruce Day]

Richard, flying C-130's above the Arctic Circle and way down in temps, we would always park near a hanger, so we could get an electrical power cart started and from that get the aircraft APU started. We could get a heater cart started in the hanger, get hot air to an engine, let it warm up for a while, then run the air from the APU through the bleed air system to start #1. From that, we could spin the others and get them to start, but you didn't want to move the prop controls until they warmed up for 10min otherwise your props could leak.

Brings back memories of Reyjavik, Iceland, Goose Bay, Aleutians, Fairbanks ( near you), and those were heavily populated areas compared to what you do. We could always go back inside and get a cup of coffee.

[Richard Flanders]

Didn't know you flew C-130's Bruce. I have lots of good Herc stories and videos from Antarctica and got to fly one for 30 minutes over the south polar plateau once. The only time I ever saw the Navy pilots frightened was when they had to shut all the engines down at my camp due to a mechanical. 660miles out of McMurdo in a remote camp with absolutely no way to preheat and not APU if it sat too long. Those guys were all over the questionable engine. Red Flag is on here now so there are Hercs going in and out of the bases.

[David Borrowman]

I guess it's up the Chinese to make sure we get our Pb allocation from here forward.......


:rotf:

[Bruce Day]

We have the world's greatest supply of lead, much of it in Missouri. However, mining and environmental restrictions make it cheaper to buy lead from overseas than to produce our own.

[John Mazza]

They had a show on cable the other night talking about that old lead mine. Upon shutting down the mine & stopping the large dewatering pumps, the old mine filled with water & created the world's largest underground lake ! Popular with divers...

[Fred Preston]

U. S. Grant was born in Point Pleasant Ohio but grew up in Galena IL. I guess after that he figured that whiskey, seegars and the most devistating war this Country was ever involved in wouldn't be much of a problem.

[Jack Cronkhite]

I will do a small study in a few weeks. Since I have some routine blood tests due, I asked the doctor to add lead testing, given the concerns out there and that I have eaten so much game in my life. If I can remember, I'll give a report.

Cheers,
Jack

Honest, I did not forget. Got the results today. NORMAL. I guess that would be the same result for a vegan or a store bought chicken eater. Now of course, that is just me. Don't transfer those results to yourself but to reiterate, I've been eating lead shot critters for at least 50 years, probably more like 55 or 56. So I did remember after all. Another thing I won't be worrying about while dropping roosters this fall. My only worry is that the "new" lifter makes it here before opening day.

Cheers,
Jack

[David Hamilton]

Dean has nicked the problem. The anti hunters wish to scare the nanny goverments into baning lead shot. They are trying to save our lives? Hell no! They only wish to control our lives. Every ban gives goverment more control. Their Motto: Everything is forbidden unless expressly permitted! David Keeping fingers crossed for Jack's lifter arriving on time!