Nature

How many pheasants and partridges do you think are shot in the UK every year? The number might surprise you.

Animal Aid says that every year, around sixty million pheasants and partridges are bred to be shot.

WildJustice says that 43 million pheasants and 9 million Red-legged partridges are raised and released to be shot.

The pheasant shooting season in Great Britain runs from the 1st October – 1st February, and the partridge shooting season runs from the 1st September – 1st February.

The pheasant shooting season in Northern Ireland runs from the 1st October – 31st January and the partridge shooting season runs from the 1st September – 31st January.

Let’s approximate and say there are equal numbers shot in Britain and Ireland. The numbers are probably not the same, but let’s split the difference and say the season overall runs from 15 September to 31 January – that’s 138 days.

Let’s say that all the birds raised are shot and that an equal number are shot each day during the season – so that’s 430,000 birds shot per day.

Is that number accurate? Let’s see approach it from another direction, starting with how many people shoot pheasants.

The Game Shooting Census and Shoot Owner Census is run by GunsOnPegs and Strutt & Parker. For their report in 2018 they surveyed 652 shoot across the UK. From that they extrapolated to the total number of shoots and arrived at 9,000 shoots and 1,724 birds shot per shoot. So they did it for us and it’s an easy calculation:

Fifteen-and-a-half million birds shot each year during the 138 days of the shooting season.

Isn’t that incredible? People paying to line up and have pheasants and partridges herded towards them, and then shooting them when the birds take the air. I mean, if you could hear all the shoots over the UK, the sound of guns must be almost continuous for 138 days.

Lead Shot

Moving on from the shooting, let’s look at the amount of lead shot that is used.

Let’s suppose that every shot bags a bird. It’s unlikely, but let’s go with that.

GunsOnPegs quotes the recommendations from ElyHawk cartridge maker. For a 12 bore shotgun they recommend the 30g No.6 and the 32g No.5.

A pellet of No.6 weighs 1.6 g. So in 30g there are 18 or 19 pellets. Let’s say 18. A pellet of No.7 weighs 1.28g. So in 32g there are 25 pellets.

Let’s assume that the shooters use 30g No. 6 and 32g No. 7 equally, and split the difference between 18.5 and 25, and say 22.

So with 15,500,000 birds, that’s 341 million pellets of lead, some of which land up in the pheasants and partridges and a lot of it that ends up on the ground.

When lead comes in contact with moist air it becomes reactive. And especially so when the soil is acidic, as most farmland soil is. And even a moment’s thought will show the danger, because lead is forbidden to be used in water pipes.

Each year, more lead lies on the ground to be absorbed into the ground and the ground water, to be absorbed by birds, animals, and humans.

Lead is a cumulative poison that affects the neurological system. Children absorb a larger amount of lead per unit body weight and are more susceptible to lead poisoning than adults. Lead causes a lower IQ, behavioural changes and concentration disorders

I came across pulmonary surfactants because I keep thinking about surfactants and Coronavirus. The Coronavirus is made up of a strand of RNA surrounded by a lipid membrane with little protein spikes sticking out of it like a crown (or corona).

Soap and washing-up liquid break up the lipid membrane that surround the Coronavirus. That’s how they destroy it. So I was thinking about people with COVID-19 respiratory inflammation and wondered whether it might be possible to wash out their lungs.

I googled and found that pulmonary surfactants are part and parcel of lung design. Here’s a quote from an article about surfactant in asthma:

Pulmonary surfactant with an optimal function in the airways is important because it stabilizes the conducting airways, prevents fluid accumulation within the airway lumen, improves bronchial clearance, acts as a barrier against the uptake of inhaled agents and has important immunomodulatory properties. In asthma, it has been demonstrated that there is a surfactant dysfunction mainly due to inhibition by proteins that enter the airways during the inflammatory process

The Coronavirus is small

Human hairs vary in thickness. Chinese, Japanese, Thai, and Korean hair is about 90,000 nm in diameter. Indian and Spanish hair is about 80,000 nm in diameter. European hair is about 70,000 nm in diameter. 

There are one billion (one thousand million) nanometres (nm) in one metre.

The Coronavirus family varies in diameter from 80 – 160nm. This Coronavirus (severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, or SARS-CoV-2 or the Covid-19 virus) is 125nm in diameter

So approximately 560 Covid-19 viruses laid side by side would be about the same width as a typical European hair.

How Far Does The Virus Travel

So if someone sneezes, does the virus fall to the ground in a gentle arc, bound up in sneeze droplets? Or does it get wafted away on the wind? The consensus seems to be that staying two metres from another person isolates you from them. Does that apply if they sneeze or cough in your direction?

Does it suggest infected people have a miasma of viruses in the air around them that tapers off to nothing within two metres? There have been several studies, criticised for not being real-world studies, showing how far the virus can travel. In a worst-case scenario, two metres seems nowhere near far enough.

A few weeks ago on TV I saw a Sky News report with the reporter driving around the medieval city centre of Bergamo in Lombardy in Italy. Bergamo was the epicentre of the Italian outbreak. The streets were narrow and the buildings were tall. I could imagine the air recirculating in the streets, full of virus.

Viral Load

Which leads to another thought, that the severity of the effect is dependent on the viral load. The more viruses one takes in, the more the chance they will overwhelm the body before it has chance to develop antibodies.

It also explains or suggests why nurses and doctors who are young or otherwise healthy are dying from COVID-19, namely that they are coming into contact with large quantities of the virus.

There’s a YouTube video I saw of people at a New York hospital explaining how they have rigged up negative pressure rooms in the hospital with negative pressure cages around the patients’ beds. They put large-bore tubing leading from the rooms, out of the windows and up to extractor fans with filters on the roof.

That directs virus-laden air out of the rooms and limit the risk of exposure to nursing staff. Additionally, the cages around the patients pull the virus-laden air that patients expel, away from the patients and out of the rooms. It seems sensible and logical to think that viruses rotating around a patient’s mouth and nose would be sucked in again unless swept away.

Hawaii is the latest in a series of island chains reaching back millions of years. Hawaii is above the water, but the earlier islands are now worn away and under the sea..

A weak spot in the tectonic plates leads to an eruption that creates a group of islands. The first eruption happened millions of years ago off the coast of north-east of Russia near the Baring Straits..

Then the plate moved slowly to the south east, cutting off the source that fuelled the formation of the islands.

Over time those islands wore away until they were beneath the sea. Meanwhile, another island chain spurted out of the weak spot hundreds of miles further along the path which the plates were taking.

And now with sonic pinging, we can see the remains of these islands – bumps on the sea bed stretching like a necklace thousands of miles across the Pacific – recording the passage of events that have happened over millions of years.