But we cannot ever pick up the lead.
Hello 444,
As I write this,,,I confess to being far more guilty than most.
We can pick up the brass, the targets, even the beer cans,soda cans, and broken glass but we can not pick up the lead shooters leave behind. Every year shooters in America spread between 25,000 tons and 60,000 tons of lead over our land. Any place designated for shooting will become a toxic waste sight. There is no way around this fact. National Forest and BLM resource managers struggle with this undeniable reality.
The cost to wildlife is having somewhere between 10,000,000 and 20,000,000 birds and animals from 130 different species die every year from lead left behind by shooter and fishermen.
. And while the problem is obviously worse at dedicated shooting areas, lead left behind by shooters is omnipresent across the land we hunt and shoot on.
For over a century in our country, beginning with the advent of higher and higher velocity cartridges,,30-06 to .270,,,then varmint cartridges, we shooters and hunters have seasoned our star spangled land with lead. The US Geological Survey finds lead in the soil nearly everywhere in our wild lands left behind by a century of shooting.
We shooters and hunters are hardly the conservationists we claim to be. And I have been far more guilty than most.