Alpine surprise!

While most women renovate their homes at some point, I'm more likely to renovate my water feature. After the main work, I study and tweak it for quite some time. As I sat in the sitting room studying it, I was surprised to see a Long-tailed Skipper on my Plumbago, which is part of the water feature. It's a species of east Texas, and the coast along the Gulf of America.

As for the water feature, I constructed it three years ago. Here's how it looked this April before renovation.

Here's how it looks today. (Still tweaking.)

I'm not sure it's any more asthetically pleasing, ie. I'm happy with either of them. The reasons I redid it was:

1. It needed to be taken apart to cut a hole in the metal grate for eventual pump replacement. I wanted to deconstruct it while I was still physically able to reconstruct it. 

2. When I originally built it, I didn't have the proper fabric liner for the grate, so wanted to update that.

3. After the original basin rock was in place, my sister and niece lugged a prettier, more suitable rock down the mountain that I wanted to use. It has a slightly better water basin and I thought it would look better. However, in hindsight, I think the original rock basin worked just as well.

4. The line connecting to the pump was clear plastic and accumulated algae in it, I wanted to replace it with black plastic so that wouldn't happen.

5. The pump has a volume control on it that I had positioned to half volume and was very happy with it. However, full volume (200 GPH) was fine too and I figured it would be easier on the pump, and maybe attract birds better, so wanted to try that.

So I'm all set. So far the birds seem to sense the change and are rather skittish, but I'm sure they'll be fine in a couple of days. Hoping for some great overwintering species. I'll find out soon, because there's a good chance of our first freeze in the next couple of days.