From: Jon. Anderson <festuca at olywa.net> asked:

>Have there been any recent studies of bird mortality along our state and
federal highway system >(I've not seen anything since about the late 70s)?

Florida Scrub-Jay researchers found markedly different survival rates in two
subpopulations and determined that living along a major roadway was detrimental
to the jays. Details on this talk are fuzzy (the abstract's at the office;
Ornithological Conference 1994), but it always stuck in my mind due to an
acronym used by the researchers.
I believe they set up transects along the "bad" roadway to search for
carcasses of car-killed jays, some of which traveled some distance away from
the road after being struck. Thus, SPLAT: Speed-Produced Lateral Afterlife
Translocation.
Morbid humor aside, I expect they have presented this material in written form
somewhere along the line; if not, they're not too hard to find (Archbold
Station).
--
Scott Richardson
northeast Seattle
salix at halcyon.com
http://www.halcyon.com/salix/