Bill-I don't think you can assume that lead shot will be scattered widely
and not be directly ingested by various bird species.  

The USGS brochure on Lead Poisoning on Wild Birds notes that "Terrestrial
bird species reported with ingested spent lead shot include mourning doves,
ring-necked pheasants, northern bobwhite quail, wild turkey, and chukars."
(Note, no songbirds are mentioned here-most research is done on game
species.)

Lead shot ingestion in mourning doves has been well documented in scientific
research for more than 50 years.  In 1999, the US Fish and Wildlife Service
reported that "mourning doves are particularly likely to ingest spent lead
shot."  Ingestion of spent lead shot is recognized as a significant problem
due to the harmful toxic effects and high mortality rate among victims. In
wildlife, primary and secondary consumption is known to directly or
indirectly impact populations through acute or chronic lead poisoning.

 

Iowa DNR and county conservation boards have planted fields of sunflower,
etc. for dove hunting fields.  

Todd Bogenschutz, upland game biologist for the Department of Natural
Resources (DNR), in an April 9, 2011 Cedar Rapids Gazette article, said the
DNR plans to establish food plots -- sunflowers, sorghum, millet and wheat
-- on state-owned leased farm ground.   (Dove shooting fields and "hunts"
are managed to attract a large number of feeding mourning doves and keep
them on the wing for shooters to target.  Typically, plot management is
implemented with the principal of planting and conditioning the birds to the
fields prior to opening day.)

According to Missouri Department of Conservation resource scientist John
Schulz in the Cedar Rapids Gazette article, a survey conducted on dove
hunting at a managed field near Kansas City found 800 hunters fired 40,000
rounds to kill 1200 to 1400 doves.  

 

Fields like this can be heavily hunted and according to Ted Williams who
writes a column named "Incite" in Audubon Magazine, wrote an article about
lead and below are excerpts from that article.  Ted Williams is an avid
hunter.

From Audubon magazine:

The U.S. Geological Survey reports that as many as 400,000 lead shotgun
pellets per acre rain annually on popular hunting fields, 

And,

Hunters shoot roughly 20 million mourning doves a year, but evidence
suggests that nearly that many die from eating lead shot. A study at the
James A. Reed Memorial Wildlife Area in Missouri revealed that 728 dove
hunters had deposited 348,037 lead pellets per acre. And in an area in
Arizona that wasn't even managed for dove hunting, 19.9 percent of doves
sampled had lead shot in their digestive tracts. Even if doves haven't
ingested lead shot, when hunters shoot them full of it, scavengers find lost
carcasses. 

And,

Ducks, swans, and geese actually key in on lead shot because to their
sensitive bills it feels like seeds. ....Mammalian scavengers are also at
risk. In one study, 46 percent of blood samples from grizzly bears showed
elevated lead. 

And,

The federal government had known about it since at least 1894, when Audubon
founder George Bird Grinnell first sounded the alarm in Forest & Stream
magazine. But today-after the public has watched for 117 years as waterfowl
and other wildlife die from swallowing lead shot and bullet fragments-the
mantra from the gun lobby that plumbism publicity is a plot to disarm
America remains unchanged. The question Americans need to be asking now is:
Will that mantra, along with the toxic injections it has preserved, go
unchanged for another century? 

Jane Clark

 

 

 


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