(Online Editor's note: Be sure to check out these related stories: Getting the lead out and Unleaded bullets?) 

When hunters leave a gut pile or carcass in the woods they assume they’re following an environmentally sound practice. Almost every big game hunter does it. The parts of the kill the hunter doesn’t want make a delicious meal for other animals, scavengers in particular. But this offering is actually poisoning and killing California condors, a species that is still recovering from the threat of extinction it faced 25 years ago.

“If you hunt with lead and you take a shot in the vital organs you’re leaving poison in the field,” said Arizona Game and Fish Department’s Condor Project Coordinator Kathy Sullivan. “A lot of hunters have no idea they’re doing that.”

In 1989 the total California condor population numbered just 22 birds. Their range, which once spread from British Columbia to northern Baja, had been reduced to southern California. In an attempt to rebuild the population biologists captured the remaining birds to breed in captivity. In 1992 they reintroduced the condors into the wild in California, and in 1996 the Peregrine Fund reintroduced California condors in Arizona. The condor’s total population is now close to 300, with 57 of them in Arizona. But over the last 10 years 34 of Arizona’s condors have died, with 10 of those deaths caused by lead poisoning, making lead the leading cause of death for condors in Arizona.

Because lead bullets often fragment when they hit an animal, one carcass can poison a whole group of scavengers. All raptors can suffer from lead poisoning, but condor populations are the most vulnerable because of their low reproductive rate. Condors, if they’re successful, hatch only one egg every two years, and they don’t even begin breeding until they’re six to eight years old, which makes the survival of adult condors more crucial to the success of the species than other raptors that have the potential to hatch more than one egg per year.

“These birds are not a fragile species,” said Chris Parish, who directs the condor reintroduction program for the Peregrine Fund. “Many other birds, if put through the rigors that condors have been put through, would not survive.”

After the hunting season ends at the beginning of December the Peregrine Fund, with the support of the Arizona Fish and Game Department, captures and tests condors for lead poisoning. The team of 11 biologists begins by x-raying carcasses for lead; if they find lead in a carcass biologists trap every condor in the area, and then test each one for lead poisoning. “Once we find lead in their blood we then treat the birds with chelation therapy to remove [the lead] as quickly as possible,” Parish said. 

Both the Peregrine Fund and AZG&F agree that this testing is not a long-term solution. “It is just keeping the birds alive long enough to convince the public that their help is warranted,” Paerish said. Which is exactly what Sullivan at AZG&F is doing. During the past two hunting seasons she wrote letters to hunters explaining the plight of the condor and promoting non-lead ammunition. She is also in charge of a program run by AZG&F that gives free non-lead ammunition to hunters in core condor range, primarily along the Kaibab Plateau, during big game season.

Sullivan is still crunching the numbers on how many hunters are participating in the non-lead ammunition program, but she estimates that the participation was around 60% in 2006, which is very similar to the previous year.

“Which is good,” she said. “But, unfortunately, it needs to be higher than that to really have a significant effect.”

Many hunters agree that some non-lead bullets, such as those made from copper, are just as good if not better than lead. But Sullivan is sympathetic to the resistance of some hunters to use anything other than lead. “People have been using lead bullets for over a century, easily,” she said. “[Non-lead ammunition] is a new thing out there, and a lot of hunters, before they get this letter from me, don’t know that lead is a problem or that there’s an alternative.”

For those hunters who are reluctant to use anything other than lead, Sullivan has a solution for them too. AZG&F and the Peregrine Fund advise taking all carcasses and gut piles out of the field, as well as covering them with rocks and brush.

“Hunters are conservationists. We know we have support from them,” Sullivan said. “A lot of people think hunters only take, but if you think about it, hunters have given more for wildlife conservation than any other group, point blank, in North America.”

ALL PHOTOS:

Courtesy photo/Chris Parish & Peregrine Fund

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