Fluff piles are useful for fluffy parents for two reasons.
Warmth. Foals, especially newborns, need to stay warm. In a pile of 3 or more chirpy babbehs safe temperatures can hold for hours.
Corralling. Though older foals and any in the walkie stage are better able to leave a fluffpile, chirrpies will get themselves tangled and lack the coordination to escape. This ensures no babbeh wiggles out of the nest while a parent is away.
The most common use of the pile is to get time for good poopies and peepees or to gather Nummies.
Problem of course with the fluffy pile is whatever babbeh is on the bottom is at risk of being pooped on resulting in either his siblings seeing him as the poopie babbeh of the group or the daddeh/mummah comming back and noticing the babbeh nu smeww pwetty and get rejected from the group.
If I had to guess, Mr./Ms. OP is gonna have the foals found dead by poppa when he returned. Probably by stray animal, or by kids, or as a side effect due to things like flood gates releasing extra rain water.
Assuming by the look of the nest area, they look like they setup house in a flood gate itself, namely the release (outside) side of them.
I know it’s supposed to be sad, but I can’t but laugh when I see the last image of the mother and dead foal’s corpses jut unceremoniously piled together in the corner of that box.
Now to add proper corpse disposal to the list of things fluffies probably don’t understand.
