Ok I'll admit to being confused. The article states/claims that one single kernal has enough pesticide to kill a songbird. Are birds not eating the seeds or are there reports I'm missing of bird kills or are the birds simply not eating the seeds? If the most widely used insecticide is lethal at the 1 seed dose how is it that we still have birds in farming regions at all? Are neonics that deadly to birds? I tried reading the linked review article and the section on toxicity. They reccomended an HD5? method. As I understood it (if at all) it is a calculated value for what they think the toxicity would be to the 5% most vulnerable species, but they would be wrong 50% of the time (over or underestimate the actual value). That is assuming that the toxicity for all birds follows a normal distribution I guess since they only test 2 species. I'll be honest, it sounds like statistics hocus pocus to me. I understand being conservative and that it's expensive to test many different types of birds, but that seems like a lot of assumptions to me, but I don't know enough stats to know if that is a reasonable thing to do or not. What am I missing here? Jeremy West Michigan. *********************************************** The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R) list management software. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html