Randy asks: "If clothianidin seed treatment is indeed
killing grain-eating birds, where are the dead corpses?"


There is a lot of research that suggests carcasses don't last very long on the landscape due to scavenging 
. Google:

"Scavenging affects persistence of avian carcasses resulting from window collisions in an urban landscape", or

"Motorways and bird traffic casualties: Carcasses surveys and scavenging bias", or

"How Long Do the Dead Survive on the Road? Carcass Persistence Probability and Implications for Road-Kill Monitoring
Surveys", or

"An estimator of wildlife fatality from observed carcasses", or

"Estimating carcass persistence and scavenging bias in a human-influenced landscape in western Alaska", or

"Wild bird mortality and west nile virus surveillance: Biases associated with detection, reporting, and carcass persistence"

In the article titled,  "Bird group calls for halt to widely applied insecticide" 

http://news.cincinnati.com/usatoday/article/1996271

the author writes:

...."The Bird Conservancy says it's worried that bird populations are diminishing, partly because this class of insecticide lingers longer in plants than the classes it replaced.
 
Birds that eat seed coated with the pesticide can die after a single kernel, and even smaller amounts can affect reproduction, the report says. It says high concentrations of neonicotinoid have been found in aquatic food chains, from California to the Netherlands, that birds depend upon for food.


"It is clear that these chemicals have the potential to affect entire food chains," said Cynthia Palmer, pesticides program manager for the American Bird Conservancy.
 
She and Pierre Mineau, a former senior research scientist at Environment Canada, that country's environmental agency, reviewed about 200 independent studies of neonicotinoids in the USA, Canada and Europe, and thousands of pages of EPA documents they obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.
 
They concluded that the EPA has "greatly underestimated this risk, using scientifically unsound, outdated methodology that has more to do with a game of chance than with a rigorous scientific process."....

My reading of this is that seeds contaminated with neonics are only a small part of the problem. Ted 

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