Hi Jaynine and Carol Spot on in ID'ing both plants! What a shame they are not native. they were scattered in a few places in Cape Breton.

Looks like a Pine Grosbeak. BN

Thanks for the confirmation, TMFF! Appreciate your taking the time.

just curious did you vacuum the liner in place while you filled it? Unfortunately my pool builder on my vinyl liner pool at my previous home did not know how to properly vacuum in a liner and I paid the price by having a liner with wrinkles in it and not properly seated. When replacing my liner I got professionals out to do it and it was absolutely a WORLD of difference in how the liner went in and fit, I quickly found out that a liner really must be put in with a vacuum. I never had another wrinkle or twisted liner. Your build looks great, after what we went through with our pool builder on our vinyl liner pool, basically he was never there and I ended up running the show, we too thought we could have done it a lot better than him. He did not set up his transit level properly to level the pool so as a result we had one corner that was lower which is so obvious when the pool is full. You did a great job! we had similar steps only ours were bigger and had the metal hand rail at the center, we had the spa jets in the steps.