I want to protect my duck children. The duck and duckling models are great and with a little more animation or polish I could see myself imprinting on them.
Though I gotta say, it felt very unfair when ducks would die in areas of the map I hadn't even explored yet and be counted as "dying due to negligence". The ways that they could die also varied in 'fairness' - the mines I could understand, that's all well and good - but the poisonous gas seemed to appear out of nowhere and often my duck(s) weren't fast enough to evade it when (not if) it spawned where we were standing. Then there's the wildlife - they roamed a little too freely, able to clear out ducklings across the map and with no way of chasing them off they had free picking of the ducklings - as soon as their AI targeted one of my beautiful children they were essentially marked for death and there was nothing I could do about it, since my only option was running and our walking speed isn't faster than theirs.
Overall I think the concept is good and I could see myself enjoying playing a game like this, but I don't think its current form is particularly fun to play due to feeling unfair. If I could cross the entire map to protect the ducklings targeted by tigers I would, but it's literally impossible since it's happening all over the map.
If the map were segmented into zones and dangers didn't "activate" until you entered that area, the player would feel less disheartened/disappointed/annoyed when the number of dead ducks increased because we would actually have a chance to do something about it, and thereby be more driven to. Maybe it's the framing around 'negligence' that got to me but it felt less 'duck against nature' and more 'me against the game'.
To be cold: Less tigers, freeze them for later, no random poison clouds and let me quack at people trying to hurt my babies.