Greetings fellow Foxies,
Daddy Long Legs are inoffensive spiders, which occur in all countries of the world with the exception of Antarctica. Harmless as they are, some people pay to exterminate them using toxic sprays. This is a waste of time for 2 reasons.

1. The chemical used is toxic, but very short lived, and within a few days, spiderlings drift in on threads of silk to recolonise vacated areas.
2. The sprays kill everything, including predators and beneficial insects that maintain a natural balance and may increase the incidence of nastier spiders like Redbacks

I read a fabulous book called Spiders: Learning to love them. Lynne Kelly, the author is an inspirational person who studied spiders to overcome her arachnophobia, and now loves them.
The book is a mine of information. For example, did you know that a Daddy Long Legs favoured food is other spiders?
They will kill much larger spiders by keeping them at a distance and wrapping them up with silk using their long legs. For example see the wrapped Huntsman spider below. They can also approach prey spider webs and tug on them like a trapped insect before nabbing the unsuspecting inhabitant.

Have you noticed that when disturbed, a Daddy Long Legs vibrates madly to make it harder for any potential predator to grab it. Vibration also makes any prey more enmeshed in the web.
Daddy Long Legs can have compound webs that contain many spiders but they have defined territories that they don’t cross without causing a fight. The ones shown are Smeringopus species - south African immigrants.
I recently watched a male spider very carefully approach a female when he quickly slipped under her and kept her fangs away as he transferred sperm to her genital opening with bulbous pedipalps.

The Sawkins residence is spider friendly, although I draw the line with Redbacks (poisonous), and White-Tail spiders in the house (can go to bed with you and nip, but do not have flesh eating venom - a myth).
I have a theory that leaving our Daddy Long Legs reduce Redback numbers. With this in mind I decided to pit a Redback against Daddy Long Legs and eventually found one after half a day looking and disturbing about a thousand resident Daddy Long Legs
I dropped the Redback in such a web complex and returning later, found a female Daddy Long Legs wrapping it up. Others moved in and there was an almighty fight before they all managed to feed together out of each other’s’ sight.
So withhold the spray and be grateful for the good old Daddy Long Legs​!
More info https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pholcidae
.

Greetings fellow Foxies,

In the last fortnight lovely Painted Marianthus (Marianthus bicolor) plants have been covered in flowers in open wandoo/marri woodland, and will increase after recent heavy rain. These plants are climbers and would be wonderful plants in a native garden. Plant hotspots are southern edge of Williams road and around the Claypit. Marianthus and Billardiera belong to the Pittosporum family. These are shrubs, often vines that often have fleshy seed pods. The pods on some  species are used for bush tucker, but after my disastrous taste test of the native apricot  I am more careful.
Painted Marianthus fruit has a thin rind when green that tastes nasty. Red Marianthus/Marianthus erubescens ( Candy Block) has similar fruit
​

Billardiera venusta (Gravel climber) that is a common November flowering vine in gravel soils that is often overlooked due to its creamy green flowers. I found some enticing looking fruit on one that looked like an elongated raisin, and offered it to my beloved wife, who reported tangy lime flavour and a fizzing sensation on her tongue. This is not recorded as a bush tucker plant but passed the test.

The beautiful summer flowering Bluebell Creeper (Billardiera heterophylla), is a recorded bush tucker plant. When green, the thin pod wall has an apple taste , but becomes nasty when purple, then dries to a woody pod. Overrated!

​Greetings fellow Foxies,

Brown mallets (Eucalyptus astringens) are generally only found on breakaways.
Unlike other eucalypts, they are sensitive to fire. To reduce fire risk they stop most plants from growing underneath them.

Brown mallets deny water to other plants by 2 means:

• Mallet leaves and bark make the soil surrounding them highly water repellent, keeping the topsoil too dry for other plants.
• Mallets intercept rain in their canopy and channel it down steeply ascending branches to their stem where it is rapidly absorbed at the base of the tree. Tannins in the bark are thought to 'thin' the water so it passes more rapidly into the soil

Mallets rarely resprout after a bushfire, but die and drop large amounts of seed that germinates to form the dense  mallet 'whipstick' thickets. The trees gradually thin out until a few large ones remain, until the next bushfire restarts the cycle.

Early summer is a wonderful time of the year to see wandoos and  brown mallets shedding their old bark to reveal gleaming cream and copper coloured trunks in the rising and setting sun.
If you sit on the Claypit walk breakaway bench that overlooks Narrogin, you will notice that old grey-brown bark of the whipstick mallets is shedding in curly flakes to reveal smooth coppery new bark. Individual mallets vary in the process, and the normally uniform array of smooth stems has become a ragged array of shapes and colours. And to top it off, Golden orb weavers have webs there too. Oh bliss!
So abandon your bed, TV, or mind numbing social media and embark on an early morning/evening pilgrimage to meditate amongst the mallets!
Om mani padme gum