​Greetings fellow Foxies,
                                     When the Friends of Foxes Lair group formed in 1999, Foxes Lair was much neglected. Numerous tracks were used as a rally circuit for trail bikes, 4WD and other vehicles, and it was used for dumping rubbish, and fireside drinking parties.
 
The group developed a management plan and got to work. A few years later when 30 years of regrowth was cut out to restore the arboretum, I realised that we had no before and after photos to record the tremendous progress that we had made.
 
I have set up a reference sites throughout Foxes Lair that are photographed regularly.
Progress over the years has been 2 steps forward and one step back.
Despite this, images of the Marri picnic area below indicate significant progress. The yellow arrow shows the same tree in each image.
 
In 2003 the picnic area was an evening speedway circle with spectators in the centre. Roads radiated out in four directions. The concrete picnic table was then destroyed by someone using a sledge hammer.

​With shire assistance we designed and built a car park using boulders and telephone pole bases to separate vehicles from the picnic area and used converted roads into the three walking trails. One night a group used the poles for a bonfire (and got a good dose of arsenic from the wood preservative).

​More boulders were brought in to create the barrier that you see now. 

​In 2010 we obtained a Lotteries Commission grant for an information bay and a new picnic table (far left) 

​In recent years Narrogin Shire has installed two new picnic tables (one under cover)

​The Narrogin shire is in the final stage of producing a trails master plan, which will provide a blueprint for future upgrades to Foxes Lair trails. A long overdue replacement map poster should be in place by June.

​Greetings fellow Foxies,
                                     This reserve is an absolute gem, which is actually a long way east of the Yornaning siding. It is 20km north-east of Cuballing in the Wickepin Shire. To get there from the Great Southern Highway, turn east at Cuballing on the Cuballing East Road, Turn left up Pauley Road, drive past Commodine Reserve, to the start of the reserve at the Modra Road turnoff.
​​We have variable soil types, First World War, the Great Depression, and the rabbit plague to thank for this reserve. As early lithographs on left show, the reserve was allocated for farming, starting from the early 1900s when there were plans for an east/west railway line through Cuballing, with Wickepin Springs in red as a proposed townsite.

Most of the reserve was cleared but regrew after the owner went broke and walked off the property. As it contains lots of rocky and poor sand areas, the land was resurveyed as a reserve.
 
This reserve is a part of the catchment divide between the Hotham, and Avon river catchments.
This reserve has a great mix of rocky soils, sandplain, breakaways and pristine forest types, which change frequently revealing new flowers and views as you wander through the bush.
One downside is that the tracks are not frequently maintained. Many are a bit rough and stony (OK for my ute), and have two sandy areas that an average car could get bogged when dry.
The reserve has upland pale sand/ sandy gravel plains that are often bounded by steep breakaways (red dotted lines). The bulk of the reserve is undulating sheoak and wandoo soil with rock outcrops (great spring wildflower country).
Arrows show suggested driving direction for average cars. Double arrows indicate that you can drive in either direction. Where tracks pass through loose sandy spots the single arrow indicates driving in a downslope direction, and to avoid stopping in loose sand. Avoid driving in the south-east corner – you may get stuck in boggy spots and below a very steep slope.

​The shaded zones below are my favourite spots

Zone 1 is granite outcrop with sheoak/wandoo gravel woodland bounded by a steep breakaway on the west.
 To get there drive on to the firebreak on the eastern side of the reserve and follow it all the way to a granite outcrop, and turn around and return the way you came.The trail continues over the granite outcrop but please do not drive on it. The trail is rocky and rough and leads to a very steep breakaway that is only suitable for 4WD vehicles.
This is lovely wildflower country in spring and a nice place for a picnic.
However be on your guard! I found a fearsome claw there that could only belong to an East Yornaning Bunyip.

if you only have a 2WD vehicle  the easiest way to visit it is to drive on to the firebreak on the eastern side of the reserve, turn right on the second intersecting track, park on firm soil at the start of the sand and walk uphill. If you wish to drive through this area with a 2WD, approach from the south, either from the track leading off Modra Road, or the (zone 3) first intersecting track along the eastern firebreak.
On the original block description this area was called ‘Worthless Sand’. Thank heavens it wasn’t ever cleared, as it has the most diverse collection of white sand wildflowers that I have seen in the district. It is a kwongan shrub plain containing scattered Banksia attentuata and Christmas tree/Nuytsia floribunda trees. You need to visit his area at least four times to catch the overlapping peak flowering periods: Late August, October, November, and December-January. Fabulous area!
A small fenced area at the top of the slope protects a rare Acacia. It also contains other species that are not growing outside, and shows that isolated reserves are not necessarily ‘natural’ due to kangaroo grazing pressure and other stresses.

​To get to zone 3 drive along the firebreak on the eastern side of the reserve and turn right on the first intersecting track. The track is quite firm but can be a bit rough and stony in sections. A good place to stop is about 100 metres before meeting an intersecting track on the right (Avoid driving through the track on the right as it contains a very loose sandy patch). This zone has wonderful open bushwalking country, great sheoak/wandoo everlasting displays and brown mallet breakaways. Good reception on my Telstra smartphone enables me to keep my bearings.
Surprisingly this reserve is not a great orchid spot. I saw Enamel, Fringed Mantis, Cowslip, Blue Fairy, Greenhood, snail Greenhood, and Jug orchids and hope to find the Leafless Orchid spot next season

​Definitely visit this reserve if you enjoy bushwalking, bird watching and wildflower displays, and your car can handle bush tracks (2WD fine if you are careful).
Do not visit if you are car proud and need well developed and signposted walk trails
For visual exploration of the reserve click this link

Greetings fellow Foxies,
Local history accounts and observations in many reserves have made me realise that our so-called ‘natural bush’ is in fact quite modified.
 
Native animal extinction effects
Over a decade ago I was involved in the closure of redundant roads, and creating new walk trails in Foxes Lair. Gravelly areas regenerated quickly, but others soil areas took many years for plant colonisation. Initially I thought that phosphate contained in gravels was the key but an experiment I carried out by digging holes and observing wetting patterns pointed to water repellence. I also noticed that water repellence caused water erosion on new tracks I created in even the light rains.
I couldn’t understand the benefit of this in the natural landscape until I was reading early settlers’ accounts while doing research for my Vanishing Farms series. We have removed vital links in our natural ecology.
The first link is burrowing animals that used to bury seeds and provide depressions that collect water for seed germination.
“(The Blight family) experienced great difficulty in growing crops owing to the large number of Boodie rats (bandicoots) that devoured the crop in the early stage of growth” (Wolwolling Reflections page 73)
 
Fire effects
Our bush depends on fire (about every 20 years in this district as a rule of thumb), for the maintenance of an ecologically diverse landscape, and fires were not uncommon on the uplands before farming.
“In the valleys of the gravel hills, a summer fire was an awe inspiring sight. The scrub and litter of years swept by the suction of this inferno of rising heat, flames often rose 50 or 100 feet scattering burning twigs and leaves half a mile in the wind. After the fire the desolation was complete, but when the rains came, the strengthened rejuvenation was unbelievable. Later when the clearing and had brought the grass and stubble of crops we became more fire conscious” (The Way Through page 35).
Hot fire removed water repellence and any competition for new seedlings.
Our scattered reserves need careful burning. A single large hot burn is disastrous because animals in the reserve can no longer escape to another place and if wiped out by fire, and there is no recruitment from neighboring bush. On the other hand, most reserves I see now have upland areas choked with dead timber waiting for the next lightning strike. I gather that local fire brigades do not have the resources or training or time to burn bush areas, so the opportunity for planned burning in reserves (apart from those administered by Parks and Wildlife) is miniscule.
 
Overgrazing
I got a shock when I found a fenced enclosure on a gravelly upland plain at East Yornaning reserve recently.  I had previously thought that the sparse wandoo/sheoak/grass tree was normal, but there larger and several more understorey species inside the enclosure below indicates otherwise.
Overgrazing by the 1930s to 1950s rabbit plague can’t be blamed as this spot was fenced long after that and Gastrolobium poison peas would have killed grazing livestock. From the large kangaroos bounding around this reserve I can only conclude that there are too many of them here.

On reflection, this isn’t unexpected as they have an amazing breeding rate in the right conditions and can only be culled after obtaining a licence (which only occurs when there is evidence of crop damage).
History tells me that dingos were common here when settlers first arrived and were around until the 1920s, so these kangaroos now have no natural predators (apart from cars on the road!).
Unfortunately most humans have lost contact with nature, and do not realise that evolution is driven by competition, where most young die annually by predation to avoid overpopulation, and nature corrects any imbalance in population in often nasty ways. A couple of times kangaroos in Foxes Lair were blinded by a virus-borne virus that spreads when populations increase. They would have starved to death if not euthanized. Similarly, the enormous breeding capacity of our marsupials is driven by them taking advantage of good seasons after much of the population had died during droughts
 
Human rulers prefer to use war to cull the young, weak, and poor.
 
Recently I noticed that Commodine Nature Reserve is notable for interestingly trimmed grass trees that reminded me of a Ring-neck parrot plague decades ago: Then it was so bad that they killed plants.
I am thinking of putting a few small enclosures in Foxes lair to monitor the difference.
 
To quote guru Greg Durell, “Natural is what you see on the day”

Greetings Fellow Foxies,
​​Yesterday I noticed honeybees clustering around cracks in a single Marri tree. My first thought was that the bees must be pretty desperate to drink the astringent reddish kino that oozes out of marri trunks and branches (kino was used by Noongars as an antiseptic and for treating stomach disorders).
 
It then dawned on me that I was surrounded by marris covered in kino deposits but the bees were only on one tree trunk. The following images reveal my discoveries as I peeled away about a centimeter of layers with a pen knife.
​​After shooing off bees and removing an outer layer of loose dead bark, I discovered droplets of honey-coloured sweet nectar oozing out with surrounding bark stained black and bright blue in one case, by a skin fungus growing on nectar-rich bark.

A bit further in was a tiny (3mm long) cigar shaped object at the top of the flow. This is an insect pupa (note the head and remnants of legs on the pupa case), that was still in the soup stage prior to reforming as an adult. Judging by the copious nectar flow, it is likely that the pupa had drowned.

​Further in was a defined oval hole of a burrow that opened out into a frass (poo) filled chamber right on the boundary between the bark and sapwood. This cambium layer contains the tree’s plumbing system where water (going up) and sugar solution (going down) is situated.
 (Random comment: this is why trees die when they are ringbarked).
 
When I mistakenly penetrated the sapwood, red kino immediately welled out and started to become gummy.

The conclusion is damage by a beetle or moth larva  borer that specifically targets the marri cambium layer causing sugars produced by the tree to flow out as nectar.
 
Large deposits of red kino on marris comes from damage to the underlying sapwood as described in this blog
​