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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS

MONTH: October 2007

California bans lead shot to help condors--big loss for NRA

 

SACRAMENTO--California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger on October 13, 2007 signed into law a ban on hunting species classed as "big game" and coyotes with lead ammunition in habitat used by endangered California condors.

Schwarzenegger signed the bill a month after appeasing the National Rifle Association by obtaining the resignation of former California Fish & Game Commission member R. Judd Hanna, who had urged the commission to ban lead ammunition.

The California Fish & Game Commission in February 2005 rejected two similar proposals presented by the Center for Biological Diversity.

Schwarzenegger asked Hanna to resign one day after 34 Republican state legislators demanded that Hanna be fired. Schwarzenegger had in February 2007 appointed Hanna to a term that was to run until 2013. The NRA and Gun Owners of California militantly objected to Hanna, himself a hunter, when Hanna researched the effects of lead on wildlife and at an August 27, 2007 Fish & Game Commission meeting distributed 167 pages of his findings to the other commissioners.

Said Hanna, in an e-mailed resignation statement, "The information I shared has been accumulated over the last 25 months of listening to public testimony, reading the science, and studying the issue. I have done a thorough job and listened respectfully to all sides. The evidence is overwhelming. Lead from ammunition is the primary cause of illness and death in the California condor.

"The matter at stake here is not my position on the Commission," Hanna continued. "It is the information itself. The mission of the Commission has been deflected by a special interest group."

"This is going to be a big black eye for the governor," predicted Pamela Flick of Defenders of Wildlife, to Timm Herdt of the Ventura County Star.

"This was a political lynching," fumed Action for Animals founder Eric Mills.

"Think of it this way," wrote Humane Society of the U.S. president Wayne Pacelle to supporters.

"American businesses are recalling toys produced in China because they contain traces of lead. But in California, we're supposed to sit still while the NRA loonies go blasting lead by the bushel basket into the wildlife food chain?"

Center for Biological Diversity conservation advocate Jeff Miller predicted after Hanna's ouster that Schwarzenegger would veto AB 821, the anti-lead bill, in an widely quoted e-mail to media headed "California's Message to Condors: Eat Lead!"

"The Condor Preservation Act is an important first step in getting lead out of the food chain," said Miller. "Lead is an extremely toxic substance that we have sensibly removed from most of our environment, including water pipes, gasoline, paint, and cooking utensils. It only makes sense to protect our most imperiled wildlife from harmful lead exposure."

Schwarzenegger vetoed 58 of the 151 bills placed in front of him during a marathon October 13 signing-or-veto session, but--after getting hit by editorialists from coast to coast--he signed AB 821.
The California lead-free ammunition zone is to include the coastal mountain ranges and the Sierra Nevada, but excludes the Central Valley.

Of the 127 California condors now alive in the wild, about 70 scavenge carcasses over parts of California, including most of the mid-coast area, the most heavily hunted part of the state. About a dozen California condors range over Baja California, in northern Mexico, and the rest inhabit Arizona, Nevada, and Mexico.

Ingesting lead birdshot and bullet fragments while eating animals who were killed by hunters but not recovered has been implicated in the deaths of at least 46 California condors since reintroducing condors to the wild started in 1992.

California condors were federally listed as endangered in 1967, when the first U.S. endangered species list was created, six years before the passage of actual endangered species protection. California recognized California condors as endangered and began formally protecting them in 1971.

Only 22 California condors remained when the last wild specimens were caught for captive breeding in 1987. There are now about 150 California condors in captivity.

"The impact of lead is unmistakable," U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service spokes-person Jeff Humphrey told Associated Press in April 2007. "Lead at its current levels would keep us from having a self-sustaining condor population."

"No single step is more important for the condor's future than banning the use of lead ammunition," Audubon California executive director Glenn Olson told Los Angeles Times staff writer Scott Glover.

Agreed Allison Alberts, director of conservation and research for the San Diego Zoological Society, "Lead ammunition is probably the leading factor impeding condor recovery." The San Diego Zoo, Los Angeles Zoo, and the Idaho-based Peregrine Fund have led the reintroduction of California condors to the wild. The goal is to establish separate populations of about 150 birds each in coastal California and the Grand Canyon region. This is believed to be the minimum necessary to keep California condors from again becoming critically endangered.

The new California law follows a series of lawsuits filed since 2003 against the state Fish & Game Commission and Depar-tment of Fish & Game for continuing to allow the use of lead shot. The plaintiffs have included the Center for Biological Diversity, Natural Resources Defense Council, Physicians for Social Res-ponsibility, and the Wish-toyo Foundation, representing Native Americans.

A political turning point may have come in February 2007 when Tejon Ranch president Robert A. Stine banned the use of lead ammunition on the 270,000-acre property, the largest private game preserve in California. About 1,800 hunters a year shoot deer, elk, pronghorn, wild pigs, wild turkeys, doves and quail at the ranch, 60 miles north of Los Angeles. Unrecovered carcasses have attracted California condors since soon after they were returned to the wild.

Long involved with the California condor recovery program, former American Humane Association western regional office director Gini Barrett served for several years as the Tejon Ranch director of governmental affairs before accepting a faculty position at the then newly opened Western University of Health Sciences college of veterinary medicine, from which she recently retired. Barrett acknowledged to ANIMAL PEOPLE on the eve of the official announcement that securing the lead ban had been her primary interest in representing the Tejon Ranch, a job in which she admitted feeling often conflicted.

The lead ammunition issue heated up after a sickly California condor caught at the Bitter Creek National Wildlife Refuge in July 2007 died a month later while undergoing treatment at the Los Angeles Zoo. The condor reportedly had 10 times the safe level of lead in his bloodstream. Zoo veterinarian Janna Wynne told media that the source of the lead could not be identified. While lead ammunition was suspected, an alternate hypothesis is that condors accumulate lead from eating animals who have ingested lead dust left from decades of use of leaded paints and gasoline.

"Governor Schwarzenegger is very pro-hunting and pro-gun rights," said American Bird Conservancy director of conservation advocacy Michael Fry, looking ahead to efforts to ban lead shot in other states, on behalf of other vulnerable species. "His signing this bill is a confirmation," Fry continued, "that this law is not anti-gun. Non-toxic, lead-free ammunition is widely available."

Researchers Derek Craighead and Bryan Bedrosian of the wildlife research group Craighead Beringia South in September 2007 reported finding high lead levels in the blood of 302 ravens who were captured in 2004-2005 at Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming. Bedrosian subsequently tested another 200 ravens and eagles to confirm their preliminary finding that the birds' bloodstream lead increases each year during hunting season. Craighead and Bedrosian published their findings in the Journal of Wildlife Management.

Hunters have bitterly opposed efforts to ban or restrict the use of lead ammunition for more than 30 years. Copper-jacketed ammunition, used to shoot big species, costs about three times as much, while many hunters believe steel birdshot is less accurate.

The U.S. government in 1991 completed a phase-out of lead shot for waterfowling on federal property that had taken more than a decade. Since then, about 75% of the lead shot used in the U.S. has been fired at doves. A study of 3,000 mourning and white-winged doves shot by hunters in south Texas in 1982-1983 found that about 2% had lead shot in their gizzards.

"Studies in other states suggest overall lead shot ingestion rates by doves are as low as 0.2% to as high as 6.4%," summarized Shannon Tompkins of the Houston Chronicle in March 2006. "In some specific areas, as many as 20 percent of doves were found to have ingested lead shot. Some doves were found to have ingested as many as two dozen lead pellets."

Of 157 doves who were fed varying amounted of lead pellets in a Missouri Department of Conservation study, Tompkins wrote, 104 died within three weeks.

"If each of Texas' 300,000 dove hunters were to fire only 16 shots a season, far below the real average, that's about a pound of lead per dove hunter, or 150 tons of lead each year," Tompkins calculated.

Losses of lead fishing tackle also poison wildlife. The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources reported in 2006 that even though the anglers on five lakes lost only one lead sinker per 40 hours of fishing time, cumulatively they lost more than 100,000 lead items amounting to at least a ton of lead in 2004 alone.

"From 1983 to 2004, the study estimates anglers left more than a million pieces of lead in Lake Mille Lacs alone," wrote Duluth News Tribune staff writer John Myers. "That adds up to more than nine tons of lead over 20 years. Scientists say a single lead jig weighing just 1/8-ounce can kill a loon," one of the more vulnerable bird species not listed as endangered.

An accumulation of lead shot and tackle in the near-shore estuaries of Whatcom County, Washington, and the British Columbia portion of Puget Sound is believed to have killed thousands of trumpeter swans since 1998, inhibiting the recovery of the species from a reported Whatcom County low of 10. Whatcom County now hosts about 1,000 trumpeter swans per winter.