The hunting leads kill. The beautiful case, will you say. Is not this their reason for being? Except that the shots of hunters do not only kill their targets. They also poison the whole food chain. Again, the observation is not new and the literature is abundant. In 1919, there is more than a century, American researchers had already shown how lost ammunition fell in ponds intoxicated ducks and other wild water birds that ingested them. More recently, the European Chemicals Agency estimated, in 2018, that the 30,000 to 40,000 tonnes of lead dispersed each year in Europe by hunting and sports shot represented a danger for many animal species, including human.
Yet, so far, we prayed to encrypt the damage. Or, to say more optimally, the benefits that could be posed by current ammunition by non-polluting projectiles. A team of British researchers has just taken care of it, not on the whole fauna, Herculean task, but on twenty-two species of raptors. And the result, published Tuesday, March 15 in the magazine science of the total environment , appears striking: on average, the only shifter change would increase by 6% the number of birds of prey in the European sky.
The choice of raptors obviously does not hold chance. Part of these emblematic birds are scavengers, others do not hesitate to feed an episodic way of dead animals or wounded by the leads or bullets. In 2015, A study done in the Pyrenees has thus attributed to the ingestion of pollutants, essentially pesticides and lead, not less than 24% of mortality in wild meat vultures and royal milans. “They are among the most protected species in Europe, so establishing the benefit of a change of ammunition at home is of obvious interest,” says Rhys Green, Professor of Conservation Science at the University of Cambridge and the first author of The study.
A global scourge
The overall benefit of 6% hides large disparities. In royal eagles, the population gain would be 13%, 12% for the tawny vulture, it would reach 14% in white-tailed polyaggues. “These species are particularly affected because they breed late, do little little, live long, continues the researcher. In addition, they feed, regularly or occasionally, carcasses of dead animals that the hunters have not found, Birds, ducks, rabbits, deer … But by tackling injured animals, non-chaoveng raptors are also affected. “Thus, the Penda Pendant’s population could grow by 6%, those of pilgrous falcons and Marsh of 3%. The gain for variable nozzles would be more modest, 1.5%, but it would still be 22,000 individuals, highlight researchers.
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