Thanks, guys! No, I did not watch that show,
@Garden10. Sounds neat though, I may look it up! Luckily, this kind of pond is pretty forgiving. Any mistakes can be undone. Nothing is screwed or glued in place. Anything can be picked up, filled in, etc. If we wanted, we could pack all of it up, fill the hole with dirt and toss grass seeds over it all and in a year you wouldn't even know it was there.
The rat thing, that was rough, because the combination of installing a pergola and adding this water feature culminated in roof rats getting up in our eaves (and then through an odd circuitous route, into our crawlspace) and having babies. It was really stressful for the hubby and I, but I found someone who would go along with my no-kill mandate and we were able to evict them peacefully. There were some funny moments, but I'm glad all the rat drama is over. A few rats still come, mostly at night (though during the winter when it was freezing, they'd come during the day too), to get water and scavenge under the bird feeders. Lucky for them, they're really cute.
@luvsgrtdanes There was a lot of rock drama while putting this together, since my husband is very particular about things and he spent quite a lot of time rearranging the rocks. I wanted the rocks to cover the waterfall but eventually I just closed my mouf and let him arrange things until he was satisfied. Though, even if the rocks overlapped in some places, it would still not cover everything. I'm just happy the birds like it. They don't give two figs about what it looks like! It's drinkies and baths!
My favorite moments of last summer involved parking a chair near the pond and sitting still long enough for everyone to come out of hiding. I managed to get to watch a robin take a bath only three feet away from me! It really was amazing. On the hottest day of the year, I had a yard party (of COURSE it turned out to be the hottest day of the year!) and even though my yard was full of people, my pond was swarmed with all kinds of birds in the water.
In the wintertime, I got to see birds I've never seen before, since it was a rare source of flowing water. We had an unusually cold winter, with day after day of everything being frozen solid... except for my pond, because of the flowing water. On days that the main part of the pond was nearly frozen solid, hubby would go out with a bucket of hot water and make a hole. (This was to make up for procrastinating on putting in the heater, lol!) So even the bigger birds got water, and if they were very determined, a bath. :)
The only bird this pond doesn't service is hummingbirds. The water is too deep and too low to the ground for them. I'm going to look into making the type of hummingbird bath someone else posted a video of somewhere earlier in the thread. I saw it last year and went YUP I NEED THAT IN MY LIFE so we'll see how that goes. However, hummingbirds still do enjoy the pond because of the bugs it attracts. In the first video I posted you'll see a hummingbird come over and zip around - she's catching bugs!
