www.montereycountynow.com FEBRUARY 19-25, 2026 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY 15 cates is that there is a clear way to tip the scales, and the Monterey-based nonprofit Ventana Wildlife Society is leading the charge to get more nonlead ammunition to hunters. ••• Back in prehistoric times, condors flew and scavenged across most of North America, feasting on the carcasses of big animals like woolly mammoths. The first recorded sighting by a European, Father Antonio de la Ascension, was documented in 1602. Two-hundred years later, Lewis and Clark saw a condor on their western expedition and described it as a “beautiful buzzard.” Gymnogyps californianus outlasted other species by hundreds of thousands of years, but suffered in modern history from human-caused pressures. DDT damages condor egg shells, particularly precious in a species that usually lays one egg per year, and takes about six to eight years to reach sexual maturity and be able to reproduce at all. (The average life span of a condor in the 1980s was six to eight years, not long enough for them to reproduce. Turkey vulture populations are a bit more resilient because they start breeding younger, at age 2 or 3, and hatch two or three chicks at a time.) Power lines, habitat loss and shooting condors also all contributed to the species’ demise throughout the 20th century. Conservation efforts to mitigate all of these factors have unfolded over decades. But condors need to eat, and they eat dead things. The scavengers, with a wingspan up to 9.5 feet, can fly 200 miles a day (or more) looking for a meal. They do not need to eat every day, and depending on the size of their food source, a California condor likely consumes somewhere between 75 and 150 animal carcasses per year. A dead gray whale could be a food source for more than a month; a dead squirrel does not last so long. Some of the food condors eat died naturally. But if the food source was shot with a lead bullet, the condor is at risk of lead poisoning from the simple act of eating lunch. “It takes a very small fragment— the size of a couple grains of sand,” Finkelstein says, to produce potentially deadly lead poisoning in a condor. They are opportunistic animals that like to start eating where the access is easy—such as a bullet entry wound in a carcass—increasing their potential exposure to lead. Lead poisoning is the single biggest cause of death to condors in California. Finkelstein and Joe Burnett, a biologist at VWS, were among the co-authors of 2024 paper published in the journal Biological Conservation looking at models to get condors to become a self-sustaining species. They analyzed 158 condor deaths between 1996-2017 and lead, at 25.9 percent, was the single biggest cause of death. (The next largest cause of death, 24.1 percent, is unknown, and it is reasonable to assume many of those were also due to lead poisoning.) Another 25 condors in Central California died from lead poisoning between 2020-2024. That lead ammunition is still used for hunting at all is technically illegal. The Ridley-Tree Condor Preservation Act, approved in 2007 by the California Legislature, banned lead ammunition for hunting in condor range. “Hunting is a valued tradition in California and hunters play a critical role in wildlife management and conservation,” the bill read. A 2013 law followed that phased in non-lead ammunition for hunting anywhere, effective July 1, 2019. And yet the use of lead bullets remains widespread today, over a decade later. The reason is a seemingly simple problem of supply and demand. In July, Kevin Kreyenhagen, chair of the Monterey County Fish and Game Advisory Commission, wrote to the state Department of Fish and Wildlife sounding the alarm about lack of availability of .22LR ammunition. “In recent months, non-lead .22LR ammunition has become increasingly difficult to obtain,” Kreyenhagen wrote. “As of now, it is unavailable for purchase among online retailers, and the vast majority of California stores. The scarcity raises a critical compliance issue: If hunters and ranchers are required by law to use non-lead ammunition when shooting wildlife, how can they reasonably comply when one of the most popular cartridges is not reliably or affordably available?” Six months later, Kreyenhagen still has not gotten an answer. ••• Burnett and his colleagues at the Ventana Wildlife Society are biologists. But the nonprofit is now a licensed ammunition dealer and senior wildlife “I want to get to a point where we can say the population is growing on its own now,” Ventana Wildlife Society Executive Director Kelly Sorenson says of California condors. He believes that goal is within reach. Bullets for smaller rimfire cartridges, like the two shown in the foreground, are much harder to source in non-lead material than larger centerfire calibers used for big game. DANIEL DREIFUSS DANIEL DREIFUSS “IT’S SO UNFORTUNATE THIS ISSUE STARTED WITH A BAN.”
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjAzNjQ1NQ==