Am I mistaken, or is that a native prairie-type garden?
I have quite a few visitors that pass through or near my postage stamp suburban yard.
66 species of birds in iNat (131 species in eBird)
6 species of mammals
6 mollusks
25 arachnids
212 insects
I love the beautiful western gray squirrels and this cute Virginia opossum.
My favorite insect sighting was this awesome western pygmy-blue butterfly that visited my blooming male coyotebrush.
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danly, this wasn’t even a fully mature bull: I think maybe 3-4 years at most. But it was towards the end of the rutting season and he was all pumped up with hormonal changes. The cow he was following around totally ignored him. But they are magnificent and I think it’s wonderful that your experiences seeing them are still sharp in your mind’s eye. 
I’m working on transforming it to native, so, yes. Lots of Rudbeckia laciniata, Liatris spicata, Asclepias tuberosa already thriving. More recent additions are Monarda fistulosa, Asclepias syriaca, Vernonia noveboracensis, Cephalanthus occidentalis, Ceanothus americanus, Symphyotrichum novae-angliae. They’ve brought a lot of wonderful insects to the garden too.
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Danly, I keep coming back to look at your charming photos. What wonderful garden visitors you have!
I’m at 287 and still have many I have not photographed
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thanks!
Living in a city in India, no big animals visit my garden. My grandparents house in Kerala however is booming with wildlife. It’s a mini jungle there! Hornbills, mongooses, monkeys, peacocks, and snakes live there.
No photos of those animals though :(
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Was the height of the planter strategically chosen to be greater than the length of one standard groundhog when fully extended?
(I spent a while puzzling over the identity of the creature by the dish on the ground before realizing it was a painted rock)
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We get some pretty neat animals. Besides the multitude of insects and arachnids, we get:
White-tailed Deer, Eastern Gray Squirrels, Fox Squirrels, American Red Squirrels, Groundhogs, Chipmunks, Downy Woodpeckers, Cardinals, Black-Capped Chickadees, Tufted Titmice, American Goldfinches, House Finches, Dark-eyed Juncos, Eastern Garter Snakes, American Toads, and Spring Peepers.
Ha ha ha! No, the planters on the deck are connected by bench sections, so the height was calculated for human leg proportions. I felt so bad for the little groundhog! Here’s a photo of the bench section (with another frequent visitor I had forgotten about, a Didelphis virginiana “Virginia Opossum”):
And, you’re close - the face by the water dish is a carved rock, rather than painted (-:
Add a ladder!
Yeah - I ended up picking some of the tomatoes and leaving them on the ground for it. (-:
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