Lea Terhune has Muscovy Ducks, and they have become the family pets. During the spring and summer months, the ducks are pretty much self-sufficient. They graze in the yard, swim in the pond, and pretty much take care of themselves. Everything they need is provided by nature herself. But in the fall and winter months they become a little more vulnerable.

Lea built a duck house to lodge the ducks at all times. This house keeps them safe at night when predators are more likely to be looking for a meal, and it protects them from the elements during the cold nights and the bitter cold months of winter.

Inside the duck house is a special heated area where the ducks can stay twenty-four hours a day if they need to. The ducks can go through their duck house into an insulated shed where Lea has rigged up heat lamps to keep them warm. That also means that Lea has to check on them several times a night, and that isn't exactly fun. But Lea can now check on them more often, and it doesn't need to be very inconvenient. Lea found a way to make this job both easier, and more practical.

"Now we have the XCam2 in the duck house to watch them twenty four hours a day." This also comes in handy if the weather's been a little rough and Lea misses watching them graze in the yard. Lea can look in on them whether there's snow on the ground or not. But there was an "unanticipated bonus," Lea said. "I can also listen to their cooing sounds as I work in my office during the day." Thanks to the XCam2, "I hear them get up in the morning, and if anything were to distress them during the night, I would know it."

Oddly enough, the ducks know it too. "It's uncanny," Lea says, "somehow they know the camera is a communication with me so when they want me, like if they are out of grain, or if they want to go out, they sit on a shelf directly across from the camera and stare at it expectantly."

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