The Virginia Department of Transportation plans to remove thorny elaeagnus from highways near Richmond and Williamsburg before flocks of cedar waxwings migrate north next spring. It seems that waxwings enjoy gorging themselves on the shrub's red berries, but often lose their lives flying through traffic on the way to or from the feast. "It's hard to know how many birds have died," says Bryan Watts, a biologist at the College of William and Mary who has spent considerable time on highway medians studying the bird kills. "We picked up a good number of bodies, but so many are nothing more than powder on the pavement or get carried off in grilles."
Waxwings have surely died in this grisly manner for years, but it wasn't until 1999 that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service noticed an unusual number of bird remains on one busy stretch of Richmond highway. Then last April, Watts collected 1,300 carcasses on one stretch of median in a single week. This spring, VDOT experimented with removing a few patches of thorny eleagnus and bird mortality in those areas plunged 98 percent. At the Fish and Wildlife Service's urging, VDOT will remove the shrubs from the four worst kill zones this winter and may eventually eradicate it from Virginia highways completely. "Hopefully we can come up with a plant that does not pose the same problem," says Frank Dorman, a VDOT spokesman."
