Hi Brian, ENet Listservers,

By the way this comes from Lead Free, Jan05 under another topic.

So Brian do you have any idea of how the lead enters across the barrier. It
shouldn't come in as pure lead, right!!. Taking in sea water and such there
might be a chemical reaction and the lead is coming in as part of another
chemical compound.

If you don't know you can at least postulate.

Yours in Engineering, Dave
Y i Engr, MA/NY DDave

<Yes, there has been one problem. It has been found that a few flamingoes
which winter in a large salt lake close to where I live died from
ingesting lead pellets. Unlike sheep, these birds eat brine shrimp on
the lake bottom and naturally ingest the shrimp and pebbles together.
The pebbles remain in the birds' gizzards and serve to grind up the
food, much as we do with our teeth. Lead shot, which the birds may pick
up, also stay in the gizzard and are themselves ground up by pebbles and
relatively large amounts of finely divided lead enter the stomach, where
it interferes with the enzymes and may be partially metabolised.
Investigation showed that a clay-pigeon range overshot the lake. This
was closed down and the authorities dredged the affected area to remove
over 100 tonnes of lead! Interestingly, there was no reduction of the
brine shrimp population in that area, so it may be assumed that there
was no significant entry of lead in the birds' food chain before they
ingested the pellets as metallic lead. This winter, there have been no
reported deaths of the highly protected flamingoes, that I'm aware of.>