Biologists say lead bullets are poisoning endangered condors. Environmental groups want to ban lead bullets. But, as you could have guessed, it isn’t that simple.

Though opinions diverge and conflict, all share the bottom line.

“We all want the same thing – to protect the condors,” said Arizona Game & Fish Department Condor Project Coordinator Kathy Sullivan. “But you won’t see a lead ban in Arizona; efforts here are going to be voluntary.”

This ad for 100 percent copper, lead-free Barnes bullets illustrates the drawback to lead core bullets (left): they expand well for quick, humane kills, but they sometimes come apart, leaving bits of lead behind in the carcass, which condors subsequently eat. AZG&F offers coupons for free Barnes bullets (right) to deer and elk hunters in Arizona's condor country.

Anti-hunting groups (or environmental groups, depending on your perspective) are threatening to sue California to force a ban on lead ammunition in condor country. The problem is that, because 99.9 percent of all hunting bullets contain lead, a ban would also effectively ban big game hunting there, at least for a while – which may be the point behind the suit, after all. The National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), unsurprisingly, opposes any forced ban, and it has an unlikely ally: condor biologist Kathy Sullivan.

There’s no question that California condors suffer from lead poisoning. Not even the NSSF, a major force in the hunting recreation industry (including for ammunition manufacturers), argues with that. But NSSF, which supports a voluntary ban on lead bullets in condor country, says investigators have not absolutely identified lead bullets, which condors ingest from carcasses and gut piles left by big game hunters, as the culprit.

“A lot of studies have been over-interpreted. Take the UC Berkley study as an example,” said NSSF spokesman Rick Patterson. “In the radioisotope fingerprinting they performed on the lead (from condors) compared to metallic lead, they found some fell outside the range of ammo.” The only logical conclusion is that the lead in those samples did not come from bullets, he said.

Patterson also said that companies who sell lead to bullet makers sell the same lead to manufacturers of other products, so the lead in condors could come from sources other than bullets. “What they failed to test for was any other sources of lead,” he said. “There’s more study that needs to be done.”

Sullivan disagrees.

“We believe the science has proven that lead bullets are the major source of the lead poisoning in condors. We believe it is very conclusive,” she said. “And the circumstantial evidence alone – condors get lead poisoning in hunting season -  is overwhelming. But even so, research is always ongoing.”

Sullivan, however, agrees with Patterson that a forced ban on lead bullets in condor country is no answer to the problem, and that it could even harm the condors.

“For condors in particular, hunting is beneficial,” she said. “Condors ‘key in’ to gut piles during hunting season.” Gut piles and carrion left by big game hunters are significant food sources for condors. Hunter success is so important to condors that Sullivan, through Arizona Game & Fish Department, offers every hunter who draws an elk or deer hunt permit in Arizona’s condor country (Hunt Units 12A, 12B and 13) a coupon for free lead-free ammo in their choice of caliber.

Bullet manufacturer Barnes has been making a lead-free copper bullet for big game since 2003; hunters who handload their own ammo can get just the bullets and hunters who buy factory ammo can get the bullet in a cartridge loaded by ammo manufacturer Federal. Sullivan said the coupon program is very successful, and will be more so when more hunters learn about it.

“The hunting community overwhelmingly supports a voluntary lead ban,” she said. “We’ve made some great first steps, and I truly believe a voluntary lead ban will work. Hunters have always been the biggest conservationists, and they can save an endangered species.”

There’s another aspect to this story, and it explains why those anti-hunting groups aren’t threatening to ban lead bullets in Arizona: land management agreements, under which hunting falls.

“The condors were re-introduced in Arizona under a different rule than in California,” Sullivan said. “Here they fall under the Endangered Species Act Rule 10 (j), the non-essential experimental rule. That means they can’t be treated as endangered, and that reintroducing condors will not conflict with land management practices. That helped us get public support for the re-introduction in conservative rural areas. And we’re going to stick by our word.”