“Until they reach the gizzard where the wildfowl grinds his food, these [lead] pellets do no harm, but, when reduced to powder…they become a violent poison.” That timely warning issued from Forest and Stream editor George Bird Grinnell 129 years ago.

The gun lobby, imagining a plot to disarm America, delayed a ban on lead waterfowl pellets for decades — this despite the fact that each year 300,000 ducks and geese were being fatally poisoned by ingesting that lead. When the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service finally issued the ban in 1991 the Firearms Coalition called it “the latest scalp in a well-organized, scarcely recognized series of flanking attacks upon the right to keep and bear arms.”

Lead bullet fragments and pellets, scavenged from carcasses and gut piles, poison far more wildlife than did lead waterfowl pellets. But the gun lobby has blocked a national ban on hunting with lead bullets and pellets for all game other than waterfowl. Today hunters can legally fire lead in every state save California.

People are being poisoned, too. While most states have programs in which hunters donate big game to the needy, few check for lead bullet fragments. Exceptions are North Dakota and Minnesota whose health departments impounded 17,000 pounds of donated, lead-impregnated venison.

Lead poisoning (plumbism) destroys brain tissue, diminishing motor and cognitive function. People who regularly ingest lead bullet fragments or pellets can survive such debilitation, but it’s a death sentence for wildlife. Animals need all their faculties to survive. Those that aren’t fatally poisoned succumb to starvation, disease, roadkill, or predation.

In 2020 the Journal of Wildlife Management reported that 94.5 percent of 91 golden eagles captured in western Montana had “elevated” lead levels in their blood. And in 2022 the journal Science reported that 46-47 percent of 1,210 golden and bald eagles in 38 states had “chronic” lead levels in their bones. Lead bioaccumulates like DDT.

“The real goal of those who are pushing lead ammunition bans is to hinder participation in hunting and shooting,” proclaimed the National Rifle Association’s Leadership Forum on May 5, 2023. But the NRA speaks out of both sides of its mouth. On the pages of American Hunter, its “official journal,” experienced hunters routinely gush about the efficacy of copper bullets. American Hunter even awarded the Barnes VOR-TX copper bullet, its 2012 “Ammunition Product of the Year Award.”

Copper bullets weren’t developed to prevent plumbism but to kill game more effectively, and they do. This, respectively, from Idaho big-game hunters and outdoor writers Scott Stouder, Matt Miller, and Holly Endersby: “Nothing but stellar performance and the knowledge that I’m not killing others out there from magpies to eagles”; “I have found copper superior in every way”; “Copper bullets are excellent... There just isn’t a reason not to use them.”

The North American Non-Lead Partnership (NANP) — 46 organizations and agencies representing hunters committed to saving wildlife and humans from plumbism — gives demonstrations in which a lead bullet and a copper bullet each weighing 180 grains are fired into plastic bags filled with water. In one typical demonstration the retrieved lead slug weighed 137.5 grains, having shed and scattered 42.5 grains of fragments. The retrieved copper slug weighed 179.9 grains.

Lead-poisoned eagles are often debilitated, weak, exhibiting depressed mental activity and open-mouth breathing. This bald eagle was fatally poisoned by a single lead-bullet fragment (photo: Raptor Education Group, Inc., Antigo, Wisconsin).

NANP isn’t plotting to “hinder participation in hunting and shooting.” Its co-founder is Chris Parish, CEO of The Peregrine Fund, started by hunters using falcons instead of guns.

Parish, who hunts with shotguns and rifles for everything from birds to elk, offers this: “Back in the early 2000s the Peregrine Fund did a study in which we quantified rates of fragmentation in lead bullets. We shot 34 deer and X-rayed them whole, then the gut piles. Our research showed how scavengers like condors were vulnerable. I spoke at the California Fish and Wildlife Commission meeting, explaining where the lead was coming from — up to 400 fragments in a gut pile. This was news to us as hunters and researchers, and we wanted to share it. I urged voluntary compliance, not regulation.

“I was so excited because here was an opportunity for us as hunters. We could have been responsible for the recovery of California condors. What a great win for hunters if we had pulled this off ourselves, another fine example of our conservation heritage.”

But the Arizona-based Center for Biological Diversity and the Humane Society of the United States used The Peregrine Fund paper to threaten litigation. That helped convince California Governor Schwarzenegger to sign a bill banning lead for hunting.

The gun lobby blamed The Peregrine Fund for the ban. Parish and his colleagues received death threats.

In its pitch for voluntary hunter compliance NANP cites the 87-percent participation of hunters voluntarily shooting copper on Arizona’s Kaibab Plateau. Impressive as that statistic is, voluntary participation is clearly not a national solution. Most hunters still use lead bullets; and, influenced by the gun lobby, they’ve been resisting regulated change since 1894 when George Bird Grinnell warned about plumbism in wildlife.

Litigation doesn’t work either. On November 3, 2023 the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected a bid by the Center for Biological Diversity to ban lead ammo on the Kaibab. “This victory,” effused the NRA, “is a significant setback for gun control and anti-hunting advocates who see ammo bans as a pivotal leap in their agenda.”

Congress needs to act.

Ted Williams, a lifelong hunter and angler, writes exclusively about fish and wildlife for national publications.