Boise conference will examine fallout from lead ammunition

BOISE – The potential risk of lead poisoning from high-velocity bullets, whether to carrion-eating condors in the Grand Canyon or to food bank patrons in the Midwest, is the subject of a scientific conference next week.

The issue has been heightened since North Dakota and Minnesota officials told food bank operators to clear their shelves of venison donated by hunters this year.

The move raised complaints from Safari Club International, of Somerset, N.J., whose members gave about 316,000 pounds of venison to the needy last year under the group’s Sportsmen Against Hunger program, and Farmers and Hunters Feeding the Hungry, of Williamsport, Md., which donates more than 282,000 pounds of venison in 27 states annually.

The four-day gathering that begins Monday at Boise State University will include more than 50 presentations on issues ranging from lead poisoning among subsistence hunting Inuits in Alaska and Russia, lead levels in ravens in southern Yellowstone National Park, lead found in swans in Western Washington state and the politics of nontoxic ammunition.

“You’re collecting a huge weight of evidence to infer or perhaps even prove there’s a serious health risk, certainly to wildlife, but perhaps even to humans,” said Rick Watson, vice president of the Peregrine Fund in Boise, a raptor recovery center that is sponsoring the conference.

Lead poisoning has been linked to learning disabilities, behavioral problems and, at very high levels, seizures, coma and death.

Watson said his group realized there might be a connection between lead poisoning, bullets, venison and humans after 1996, the year it began reintroducing rare California condors in northern Arizona. As many as 60 now soar over the Grand Canyon and southern Utah, but researchers and the Arizona Game and Fish Department found the scavengers were ailing from lead poisoning after eating hunter-killed deer and leftover gut piles.

In 2006, five condors died of lead poisoning and 90 percent of the rest had signs of exposure.

Peregrine Fund researchers killed two deer with high-velocity lead ammunition and found that the bullets fragmented on impact, leaving the animal riddled with microscopic lead particles.

“We thought, ‘For interest’s sake, let’s take a look at some of these packages to see if there was any lead’ – and there was,” Watson said.

Skeptical, Dr. William Cornatzer, of Bismarck, N.D., a physician, hunter and Peregrine Fund board member, used a CT scan to examine about 100 packets of venison from local food giveaway programs and found 60 percent had multiple lead fragments.

While no cases of lead poisoning from venison had been reported, his research helped lead to the warning to food banks in North Dakota in March. Days later, Minnesota followed suit after separate tests in that state.