The Rise of the Copper Top: Copper Bullets are Making Life Cleaner for You and Longer for the California Condor

I've written a lot of posts by now. There have been a bunch of themes that have come out.. success is good, pollution bad, full ecosystems are good, and oil is bad, and one underneath has been that it's a bummer if we have to regulate to fix a problem if the regulation doesn't yield any other benefits to us. If we are walking off an ecological cliff, it's nice to still do it with our constitutional dignity as any red blooded American will tell you. that leads us to the Red Blooded topic of this post:



No one will scream more about civil liberties than an American gun nut, and it's a weird juxtaposition that some of the most active outdoors men are hunters, not hikers with Master's degrees in Ecology and rugged good looks as the REI catalog might have you believe, and hunters are by nature gun nuts. About 6% of Americans hunt in any given year, and maybe 15% fish.. with likely a lot of overlap between the two. It's become a sub theme of this blog to explore Red State and War Zone environmental successes, search where most environmental writers might not be comfortable searching, because as much as the global warming fight and many other eco fights are championed by the left, it's when the right buys in that things tend to happen, money starts to flow, and the right tend to be really successful at things they set their mind to. I'm not a Randian, I just have never seen Al Sharpton create value, not that he is required to, but most solutions take resources even if simple prohibitions seem called for, since we have divided the modern world in terms of property, and the left, away from the major cities, usually doesn't have a large portion of the resources.
If a Conservative act's like an Environmentalist, it's called being a Conservationist. This is a polite code word for Hunter in the ecological world. They tend to be driven by a desire to preserve habitat, which is awesome, but they often get a crazy gleam in their eyes talking about how nature needs man to balance it out scientifically with 'takings', which means shootin' stuff.  In a lot of environmental fights it's been the alliance of pristine environment seeking lefties and 'nature filled with delicious and ample game' righties that has made the difference for a greener planet. Half of many successful green movements wears camo is a funny way of saying it. But this story, the story I am about to tell about Copper Bullets, slices this Oreo a different direction. It's back to the classic Blue vs. Red , Left. Vs. Right, regulation Vs. freedom narrative, but if you talk to those involved, the Conservationists are now thanking the Environmentalists for better Gun Control, but by gun control I mean better targeting.. what I mean by that will be explained a few paragraphs down, but here is a hint:

So remember the California Condor? One of my first Hope posts two years ago or so was about this humongous flying dinosaur.. and it's sensitivity to DDT and Lead poisoning... let's face it, like some of the guys who used to puke on me in College, the condor is pretty un-evolved. At one point in the late 80's there were only 22 individuals of the species in existence!  It doesn't have a lot of adaptations to some modern stresses since it's about as old as they come, kind of like your grandparents and the flu. And with only about 425 of them alive (and increasing!) there isn't a lot of room for the species to undergo natural selection if it is to survive on this planet. It suffices to say that if we want the Condor back in place as the top scavenger on the western part of this continent, we need to keep DDT out of it's blood and Lead out of it's stomach. Well.. the DDT thing.. big Success... Check!

However, the lead thing.. man.. that is a bit harder.. and here is why.. Condors are Scavengers.. they eat dead animals, and when you think about the reasons they die, people hunting and abandoning game with the bullet in it for them to scavenge is one of the largest. And when I say people hunting, to be clear, what I mean is people using guns to hunt mostly mammals, with a lead bullet, and then abandoning the portion of the meat that has lead contamination to the gut pile, the portion of the animal the bullet, bullets, or pellets passed through, tore up, and contaminated. It's well known to most hunters that especially if you use a highly frangible ammunition, an ammo that breaks up on purpose, or lead shotgun pellets, or even solid lead bullets that don't break up but leave a trail as they pass through tissue, that you don't eat that part. If you do, studies show, in any part, you spike your Blood levels of Lead for a month or two, and it can lead to both short term and long term health consequences including neurological issues (remember the Lead Paint chip jokes when we were kids?). Maybe you know the old rumor about Rome falling because the people went nuts because they used lead in their newly invented Plumbing. The Latin word for soft metals is Plombo, the root of the word for Lead in many languages and it's Atomic Symbol PB, so you can see the connection. So most hunters dispose of this part of the animal, and that often means dropping it where you dropped the animal, leaving it to nature to clean up. In come the scavengers.. crows, vultures.. they might get sick, they might even die.. but we don't notice it as much because there aren't only 425 of them under more surveillance than the Mob in the 80's, over two countries and 5 wild release sites. If it's a Condor that dies, the 35+ million dollar rescue effort that has been undertaken to save them kicks in to high gear and they get an autopsy, and unlike the nameless crows, vultures and coyotes that might stumble into a bush and die from lead poisoning, they produce autopsy results that might lead to lawsuits, laws, and regulations. Since the first release in 1991 in Big Sur, every condor in the world get's watched like.. ummm.. a condor! From Baja Frontera (the north state of Baja Penninsula in Mexico [Mexico has 32 states.. cool huh!?] where a number of pairs were released into it's highest mountains, the Sierra de San Pedro Martir ) to Central California to Northern Arizona and southern Utah, they are all watched attentively by government agencies, numbered, and accounted for whenever possible, even by casual observers on twitter .

So all that scrutiny I am talking about.. it leads to reports, Gubmn't bein' gubmnt', and the autopsies I talked about.. have a look at the latest report, from October 2014 (that was 3 months ago I know.. yup.. they are late..) and once you have familiarized yourself with it, scroll down to page 9:

Condor Program Monthly Status Report 2014-10-31.pdf

what you might have noticed is that there were 10 deaths from lead in 2013, and easily as many suspected or pending for 2014.. that's more than 2% a year of a population numbering in the low 400's..

http://www.fws.gov/cno/es/calcondor/CondorCount.cfm

Now obviously the west is littered with old bullets, and it ain't good for anyone.. it get's into drinking water, washes into oceans, and into the muscle tissue of fish, or into wind driven dust, onto plants we eat, and into the blood stream of animals we eat, but the big issue here is specifically that they eat the contaminated Carrion, so even though those bullets lying in the dirt everywhere from last weekends shootathon in the desert aren't a good thing, it's the specific act's of current hunters that cause these deaths.

Enter the American Entrepreneurial System stage right..

guns aren't a new thing.. the Chinese invented gunpowder I am not sure how long ago, and continue to love it (ever been in China at New Years.. give up on sleep and just enjoy it!). At some point someone invented the gun:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun

there is is.. 10th century in China.. it made it to Europe by the 13th...

so lead became the de facto ammunition.. heavy.. easy to heat up and work with.. cheap and available.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet

I'm not a metal or gun historian, but at some point people began to coat bullets with copper for a few different reasons: They don't leave residue on your hands and on your rifle barrel, they don't mushroom upon impact, which is banned under certain conventions, and they hold up well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_metal_jacket_bullet

But for some reason, this company called Barnes Bullets, started in a guys basement during the great depression, started to make pure copper bullets in the 70's with some success.

http://www.barnesbullets.com/resources/about-us/history/

http://www.americanrifleman.org/articles/2014/10/20/barnes-x-bullet-25-years-of-premium-performance/

That last article tells the story well. It was this guy, Randy Brooks, whom Barnes convinced to buy his company back from some people who were letting it languish:

From what I can tell, they were the first lead free manufacturers of Rifle Ammo, and it had nothing to do with saving Condors, since that is an idea that makes a red meat eatin' hunter blush. They are made in Central Utah now, and were just bought up by Remington Firearms, also an Ammo manufacturer. 

I recently spoke to one of the factory representatives for Barnes, and he told me they make the with a press.. they cut grooves in copper round stock, and jam the tip into a bind which seals the bullet to a point and hides the seams, until it fired into something and splits up, leaving so much damage that hopefully the prey dies quickly and doesn't run off on you, which both laws and the unwritten code of hunting requires you to stalk until it dies, which is a huge fear of many hunters, and a somewhat sad occurrence to witness.

http://www.barnesbullets.com/

I once spoke to an experienced hunter in a hunting store near the Book Cliffs of Utah. Myself and a motley group of friends were trying to shoot a Bison that one of our buddies had magically drawn a very rare ticket for, a golden ticket of sorts, and we were trying to learn as much as we could and buy the right kinds of bone saws and knives before we took off into the wilds, and this guy spotted me grabbing some copper bullets. I was grabbing them because I am a greenie, no doubt about it, but he just happened to be walking by, and was a local hunting guide, and just said something like 'nice choice dude'. I started joking with him and asked why, which led to an hour long lesson for me and my buddies on a lot of things we needed to know. You see Hunting Bison was very new in this area, just a few years old, but he had done it, as people who had drawn the tag had hired him to ensure success. It was a serendipitous meeting, but he started off by explaining to me that he didn't give a shit about the ecology and all that (This guy is a Conservationist, remember before?) but that the bullets were the most accurate he had ever used because the process of extruding copper into rods to be made into bullets traps a lot less air bubbles than Lead. He said that over a 600m shot, not uncommon in the open territory around us, those little air bubbles can have an effect on the external ballistics of the bullet, making it fly erratically in ways you might not notice at the usual 100 meters. He said as much as he hated what was happening in California and in DC to give Lead Bullets a bad name, these were batter for a number of reasons. They are also longer for the same weight, measured in 'Grains' by the gun community, since they are lighter, and that additional length for the same weight can also lead to a faster and truer flight.  Some other companies followed suit, two I have found, wait.. three, and started making them on lathes, an even more precise, for big game hunters for whom that one shot is worth every bit of 3 bucks a bullet if it means making a 20 thousand dollar rhino hunt successful.

http://monolithicmunitions.com/

http://www.gsgroup.co.za/04hp.html  These guys are in South Africa, where big game hunting is big money.

http://site.cuttingedgebullets.com/

But then the condor thing started to get real.. the precious few were dying again like before they gathered all the survivors up and bred them in safety, and California did what it does.. it started to make rules the make the world a bit more perfect in their eyes, and decided to ban Lead ammo in a 7 county area of Southern California in 2007:

https://nrm.dfg.ca.gov/FileHandler.ashx?DocumentID=82836&inline

 and passed a law to ban it in all of California for hunting, passed and signed by Jerry Brown in October of 2013, by 2019:

http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billVotesClient.xhtml

Utah and Arizona, the only other states where the Condor is hanging it's hat right now (it obviously isn't wearing it) created voluntary programs in the affected areas, the only politically expedient moves in these very conservative states, that seem to have some success:

http://wildlife.utah.gov/wildlife-news/1293-california-condors-get-help-from-hunters.html

Now there is a precedent for this kind of ban and move.. it started a long time ago with Waterfowl and Lead Shot.. every time a duck hunter fired a shotgun blast from a blind, he was tossing ounces of lead into the environment. The government and Conservationists and Environmentalists all got together and banned lead shot in waterfowl hunting, and steel shot replaced it, a but more expensive, a bit faster, but people adjusted and waterfowl numbers rebounded in surprising numbers. The birds that didn't get blown out of the water were often bottom feeders like ducks, and they would ingest pellets that fell to the bottom of a pond, or river, or slough, when their cousin Donald got the 12 gauge dinner invitation, and die with it in their stomach from some combination of poisoning and starvation:

http://www.fws.gov/cno/news/2000/2000-177.htm

estimates are that the ban saves over 1 million ducks a year (imagine how many more if we restored the Grand Kankakee, but that's another story). Now while I will bitch all day long about the California Plastic Bag ban and many moves towards Idiocracy, that steel shot ban in 1991 did not lead to an abrupt outbreak of tyranny in the US, and it was interestingly instituted under the watch of a Republican, none other than George Bush 41.

Barnes bullets have been trucking along for a long time before the ban and maybe they don't even want the boost that will come with the ban in 2019 if it means a step towards tyranny. The NRA will no doubt fight this and other moves, but for better or for worse, the ban is leading to lot's of ammo makers adapting Copper bullets, from Federal to Winchester, and government contracts for the military are moving that way as well. Barnes just received a major sniper bullet contract for instance. PMG and a few others are behind the game, but used to have contracts with Barnes I recently learned. 

All in all it's just ounces of progress, when the Carbon war and other environmental fights are measured in Millions of Tons or thousands of acres.. etc. etc. but each tenth or so of an ounce might be one Condor saved, one crucial piece of genetic diversity, one more step towards restoration of food webs, which despite arguments to the contrary, tend to produce the widest variety and volume of overall game. Hope will turn into satisfaction when the 10 lead poisoned Condors a year turns to none, and they fill out their original territory, but the effort, improvements and a little bit of cool man pleasing technology are going precisely where they should, one round at a time.

it's hard to make these buggers look cute.. but they do look impressively huge and vulnerable!

http://www.huntingwithnonlead.org/videos2013.html