I am glad you at least know, what are these nesting pads made of? One thing you did not know your was your lil one would eat it. I use pine shaving and have never had a problem with any of my ducks/chickens or geese eating it it's large flake too. The kind used for horse stalls. I'm so sorry this happened but I would diff warn others.Yes, yesterday afternoon I got what's still considered an interim report back from the facility. The material matched the nesting pad sample we took in. I missed the doctor's call because I was on a conference call, but I'm thinking it's considered interim because a couple of the toxicology results still aren't back from the lab. They typically wouldn't declare a cause of death until all results are back even if they're 99% sure what the cause was.
I feel so guilty over this. I was the one who researched nest pads and bought these. I'm terribly upset over it. Once I can get my thoughts sorted out, I'm going to search back through my BYC posts to find the ones where I've said what a huge fan of nesting pads I was. I need to put a caution in those about what happened to us. I also have no idea what we're going to use for nesting material next year. I'm afraid of pine chips for the same reason, don't like using pellets in nest boxes, and all I can think of is straw, which I also don't favor. We'll probably go with straw even though it's not very absorbent and degrades quickly when it gets wet. I'm hoping that won't be a problem since ducks normally don't use the bathroom in nests, and at least straw pieces are too big for them ingest a lot of it.