Shot (pellet)
Lead shot is also used for a variety of other purposes such as filling cavities with dense material for weight and/or balance.
Producing lead shot from a shot tower was pioneered in the late 18th century by William Watts of Bristol who adapted his house on Redcliffe Hill by adding a three-storey tower and digging a shaft under the house through the caves underneath to achieve the required drop.
[1] The hardness of lead shot is controlled through adding variable amounts of tin, antimony and arsenic, forming alloys.
The roundness of the lead shot depends on the angle of the inclined surfaces as well as the temperature of the liquid coolant.
Buckshot is a shot formed to larger diameters so that it can be used against bigger game such as deer, moose, or caribou.
Below is a chart with diameters per pellet and weight for idealized lead spheres for U.S. Standard Designations with a comparison to English shot sizes.
[7][8][9] Once ingested, stomach acids and mechanical action cause the lead to break down and be absorbed into the body and bloodstream, resulting in death.
Even low concentrations of lead have a negative impact on energy storage, which affects the ability to prepare for migration.
"[10] Upland game birds such as mourning doves, ring-necked pheasants, wild turkey, northern bobwhite quail and chukars can also ingest lead and thus be poisoned when they feed on seeds.
[12] Foraging studies of the endangered Californian condor have shown that avian scavengers consume lead fragments in gut piles left in the field from harvested big game animals, as well as by the consumption of small game, or "pest animal," carcasses that have been shot with lead-core ammo, but not retrieved.
Shot pellets used in waterfowl hunting must be lead-free in the United States, Canada, and in the European Union.
[18] The bald eagle has similarly been shown to be affected by lead originating from dead or wounded waterfowl—the requirement to protect this species was one of the biggest factors behind laws being introduced in 1991 by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service to ban lead shot in migratory waterfowl hunting.
[19] The hunting of upland migratory birds such as mourning doves was specifically excluded from the 1991 US restrictions as scientific evidence did not support their contribution to the poisoning of bald eagles.
[22] The Missouri Department of Conservation introduced regulations in 2007 in some hunting areas requiring the use of non-toxic shot to protect upland birds.
[11] Approved alternatives while hunting migratory waterfowl include pellets manufactured from steel, tungsten-iron, tungsten-polymer, tungsten-nickel-iron, and bismuth-tin in place of lead shot.
[23] The higher pressures required to compensate for the lower density of steel may exceed the design limits of a barrel.
