Beringia South Grant Gets the Lead Out

As you know, last year one of the projects 1% for the Tetons funded distributed free copper bullets to local big game hunters.  Earlier today, I met with the folks at Craighead Beringia South who ran that project.  They asked to meet with me so they could share with me their preliminary findings.

Here is the study's key line:

"This (finding) strongly supports the hypothesis that lead levels in scavengers is directly caused by hunting with lead based ammunition and suggests the number of hunters that use non-lead ammunition has a substantial positive impact on raven lead ingestion."

In other words, the project - for as small-scale and pilot-projecty as it was - showed that hunting with copper bullets does, in fact, significantly reduce the amount of lead in the ecosystem in general, and carrion-feeding birds in particular.

Science isn't always this clean, but when it works as it did this time, it's pretty cool. Your donations made this possible, and I hope you feel as good and excited about this as the folks at Craighead Beringia South do - they're thrilled out of their gourds.

For those of you interested in seeing the full report, you may download the pdf document (847 kb)

As always, thanks for your support of 1% for the Tetons. Thanks to your generosity, people in this community are doing some pretty amazing things.