Grand Manan woman makes gruesome discovery while walking beach at low tide

A Grand Manan woman is hoping someone can tell her what killed 32 common eider ducks she found on a beach in Seal Cove this week.

Bonnie French said she went for a walk at low tide, about 4 p.m., on Wednesday and noticed a lot of seagulls eating something.

When she got closer she could see the dead ducks.

"It was just dead bird after dead bird after dead bird," she said.

"It was sad."

Hard to find answers

French said she's never seen anything like it in the five years she's lived on the island.

"It was mind blowing," she said.

French started calling around to try to let someone know about it but said she couldn't reach anyone because it was after hours.

She posted about the ducks in a community group on social media and got more suggestions of places to try calling Canadian Wildlife Service, the Department of Natural Resources, the Atlantic Wildlife Institute and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.

French said she left messages everywhere she could.

That evening a conservation officer got in touch, she said, and came to collect some samples.

French had collected a couple herself.

"I put on some gloves and had a couple of garbage bags and double-bagged them and put them in my freezer," she said.

No obvious injuries

Someone picked them up from her Thursday and said they'd be back in touch if they found out what happened to them.

Nothing was obviously wrong with them on the outside, Frenchsaid.

"They had all of their feathers. They didn't seem like they were marred up or anything like that."

It seemed like they had drowned, said French. They were very heavy when she picked them up, as if they were waterlogged.

Members of the community have suggested several possible causes of death.

French and some others think it's likely they were pounded to death by storm waves.

Others said they could have been struck by lightning, infected with avian flu or entangled in nets around salmon aquaculture cages.

Cooke says salmon farms not the culprit

A spokesperson for Cooke Aquaculture, which farms salmon in the area, described the latter as an "irresponsible claim," "not based on fact."

"Our operations on Grand Manan have no impact on ducks," Joel Richardson said.

Avian flu was recently found in geese in Nova Scotia.

If that's the culprit, French is anxious to know about it.

"There's a lot of people on this island who own chickens and ducks, including myself," she said.

She has two ducks and six chickens, which she keeps penned during the winter anyway.

No word from Fisheries

But some other islanders said they are keeping their chickens inside as a precaution against avian flu.

"I'm really hoping that people get back to me and let me know what happened," she said.

CBC News contacted the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, which confirmed a fishery officer collected some of the ducks for the Canadian Wildlife Service, which falls under the federal department of Environment and Climate Change Canada.

No one from that department was available for an interview by publication time to provide any information about the investigation.