Will someone please think of the eagles?
bird brains
Bald eagles in the US face a new existential threat: lead poisoning from bullet fragments left behind by hunters, Insider reports. In other words, the national bird of the United States suffers from one of America’s most American pastimes.
“Every time a lead bullet hits a deer, it shatters into many, many pieces,” says wildlife biologist Todd Katzner, co-author of a new study on the phenomenon published in the journal sciencetold Insider. “It only takes a tiny fragment the size of a pinhead to kill an eagle.”
The team discovered a startlingly high prevalence of lead poisoning in the two eagle species after examining data from 2010 to 2018, suggesting that widespread hunting poses a very real threat to bird species in the US — beyond the bare, that is Shooting and killing wild animals out.
existential threat
A whopping 47 percent of bald eagles and 46 percent of golden eagles showed signs of chronic lead poisoning among the more than 1,200 eagles studied by the researchers. About a third of both eagle species showed signs of acute lead poisoning.
Lead poisoning can be devastating to the health of birds, causing injury or even paralysis and death in the most acute cases.
Worse, the researchers found that lead poisoning rates were high enough to actually affect the growth of the species.
“Over a period of 20 years you are talking about thousands and thousands [eagles] who are removed from the population,” said Katzner Insider.
Fortunately, there’s an easy way to mitigate at least some of these cases: convince hunters to switch to lead-free bullets. It’s something they’ll likely do willingly “once they find out they might be poisoning animals,” said co-author Vince Slabe, a research wildlife biologist at the nonprofit Conservation Science Global Insider.
CONTINUE READING: Almost half of the bald and golden eagles in the US have chronic lead poisoning, most likely from bullet fragments [Insider]
More on lead: Scientists warn that more electronics can lead to more lead poisoning
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