Bald eagles all across the country are fighting for their lives — because of something totally preventable.
She died. Why? Because her body was loaded with lead, 20x toxic levels. How did lead get into her body? Either she ate an animal that was shot by a hunter with lead bullets, or a fish that had lead tackle in it. Thanks to our new Department of the Interior secretary zinke, other eagles will die. Why? Because, as his first official act, zinke lifted the ban on lead ammunition and fishing tackle on federal lands imposed by President Obama. Why? Because the NRA wanted it gone.
So this beautiful bird is another victim of trump.
(Note, my childish behavior continues. I was capitalizing zinke’s name until this episode. I thought he would be halfway decent. Wrong. He is now officially demoted to lower letter nomenclature, like his boss trump, the occupant of the white house.)
After people all across the country learned that countless bald eagles are dying because of lead poisoning — and U.S. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke just overturned a ban on lead bullets that previously helped protect them — another bald eagle was admitted to the Blue Mountain Wildlife Rehabilitation and Education Center in Oregon.
The bird couldn't eat. And the level of lead in her body was dangerously high. It's likely that she ingested an animal carcass that was left to rot after it was shot with lead bullets by a hunter, or ingested lead fishing tackle. Because lead bullets and fishing tackle are so prevalent, bald eagles keep dying of lead poisoning. If hunters opted for non-lead ammunition, so many needless deaths could be prevented.
"Sadly, we admitted another bald eagle yesterday," Blue Mountain executive director Lynn Tompkins, who has been trying to save bald eagles and other raptors in need for the past 30 years, told The Dodo at the time. "Her lead level is 385 micrograms per deciliter. It is nearly 20 times what is considered toxic." Wildlife rehabilitators examined the bird and found that there was lead in her digestive tract.
Tompkins and her staff did all they could for the bird, but she became another victim of a totally preventable problem. They tried to force-feed her rabbit fur in hopes that it will help her regurgitate the lead before it poisoned the rest of her body, but she absolutely refused to eat. "She died a few hours later," Tompkins said. "We could not get the lead in her gut out."
This picture kind of brings the issue home:
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) researchers examining 58 dead bald eagles in 2012. Sixty percent had detectable concentrations of lead; 38 percent had lethal lead concentrations. Credit: USFWS
