Shoot to Kill

The bald eagle, our national bird, is everywhere. It’s on the great seal of the United States. It was adopted as the emblem of the country in 1787. It’s on every one dollar bill, coins, and passports. It’s up there with the flag, Liberty Bell, and Statue of Liberty as a universal symbol of American strength. It’s been a sign of government authority since the Roman Empire. The bald eagle has survived despite man’s carelessness that almost wiped it out of existence. Over development into their natural habitat, hunting, and pesticides made them an endangered species for years. The number of adult breeding bald eagles in the US and Canada has dropped by 2.9 billion since 1970. Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” in  1962 lead to the banning of the pesticide DDT ten years later. It was not only killing animals like the bald eagle, but contaminating soil and water for decades. Conservation efforts has increased the bald eagle population from 417 nesting pairs in 1963 to more than 71,400 nesting pairs and an estimated 316,700 individual birds in the lower 48 states.

But there is something that is threatening that population growth, lead bullets. A recent story by the Philadelphia Inquirer reported on a Cornell study published in the Journal of Wildlife Management that shows lead ingestion by bald eagles has reduced their population growth every year by 6% for males and 4% for females. The study covers thirty years. The study was done in seven Northeastern states including New Jersey. Pennsylvania ranks number six in the country in gross cost for hunting licenses. So if you can’t hunt bald eagles, how do they get lead poisoning? When hunters kill their prey, they often field dress their kill and leave some remains behind that are contaminated by the lead bullets. Even the remains of animals like raccoons and groundhogs shot with lead bullets can cause lead poisoning of the bald eagles that feed on the remains.

There is a solution, copper bullets. They are just as effective. Some hunters argue they are more expensive. But there are hunters who want to solve the problem. The website HuntingWithNonLead.org promotes the benefits of copper bullets over lead. You may be asking why should we care? Two years ago I wrote about how the federal government issued a “clarification” of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. It eliminated criminal penalties for “incidental” deaths of migratory birds that happened in the course of normal business. The government stopped investigating bird deaths. According to a New York Times investigation, as long as a company or local government doesn’t mean to kill the birds as a result of developments, it’s okay. With a new administration, the Interior Department revoked these ridiculous changes last October.

Protecting the environment is one of the critical issues facing us all. Denying an obvious problem or not caring will not make it disappear. Rachel Carson warned us decades ago. She said, “The road we have been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road-the one less traveled by-offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth.” When we shoot to kill, we must understand the consequences.