Greetings fellow Foxies,
                                     I love looking at lichens after rain, when they transform from dry scabby coatings to almost iridescent grey, green, purple, yellow, etc shapes and patterns on rocks, bark, and wood that excites my imagination.
according to Wikipedia ‘a lichen is a composite organism that arises from algae or cyanobacteria (or both) living among filaments of a fungus in a symbiotic relationship. The combined life form has properties that are very different from the properties of its component organisms.’
The algae/cyanobacteria produce sugars by photosynthesis that they share with the fungi in exchange for protection, moisture and minerals. They are very tough, occurring from desert to tundra and very old. They evolved at least 400 million years ago and live longer than most organisms.
Breaking news: all lichens also contains another fungus that coats the other 2 participants and holds them together. Everything you want to know about lichens can be found on this website.

Lichens do not affect living organisms, but rely on air, water, dust,  and minerals derived from acids that they exude into underlying rock and organic matter.

Greetings fellow Foxies,
We have a couple of common and really interesting lace web spiders in Narrogin. The name comes from the lacy nature of their very sticky webs.

The Black House Spider Badumna insignis that has a funnel-type web in every home and many cars (I have one in my external rear vision mirror), looks nasty but is really a wimp. They are very reclusive and are regularly eaten by birds and White-tailed Spiders.
The one on the left is about to feast on a donated cockroach, but only after I was hidden from it.

In contrast, the Social-webbing Spider Phryganoporus candidus is inconspicuous, but builds an amazing communal web in summer to rear its young.
In late summer a young female establishes the web that is enlarged by her and her spiderlings that may number in the hundreds. The web contains a central living area of interconnecting tunnels that is surrounded by a communal catching web. It becomes a small city that contains the spiders, their parasites, and other beasties that feed on the debris. The dew-laden social web is an early stage.

In late spring, the sub-adult females leave the nest, and are followed later by the males. These spiders then establish solitary webs, and will eat any intruders, with the temporary exception of males for mating.
Until this autumn, I have wondered where these solitary webs were.
If you look closely on sheoak needles, you may see a miserable little web that ends in a thin conical retreat of silk and insect bits.
It took me a long time to coax one out with tasty flies and moths. They are small (about 5mm) lovely spiders that are covered with white hairs to help them cope with hot dry weather.

Greetings fellow Foxies,
There have been changes at Railway Dam that deserve a follow-up to the
January 2014 blog.
These include the information bay, the recently installed memorial to World War 2 immigrants who are now an integral part of Narrogin, and my rediscovery of the abandoned Archibald Park jet boat course.
At great expense to the management I have created two walking trails in the reserve. The Dam Walk (white 650 metres 20 minutes), and the Archibald Park Walk (red 1200 metres 40 minutes).

When the first steam train passed through Narrogin from Beverley to Albany in 1899, it was a hamlet with few people. However within 30 years, Narrogin was a bustling town with the largest train junction outside of Perth. Over a third of Narrogin’s population were directly dependent on railway employment, and many sports had at least one railways team. These days are long gone.
Steam locomotives require large amounts of fresh water Built in 1912, Railway Dam was the third local water source (after the Narrogin Pool, and then a dam, both of which were near the now derelict railway station). This was only for railway use, and the town remained critically short of water until a pipeline from the Wellington dam at Collie was constructed in 1954

As land surrounding the dam was gradually cleared for agriculture, increasing salinity led to the construction of the spaghetti-like system of drains to separate fresh and saline inflows. The drains and weirs originally started up near Graham road. A weir and a separator on the south western edge of the reserve also redirected fresh (blue), or saline (purple) water to either the dam or the disposal drain that bypasses the dam. Where they crossed the saline channel went underneath the fresh channel.

A memorial and associated information commemorates a remarkable time in the 1950’s when European immigrants came from displaced persons camps to Australia. In return for free transport, they were required to spend 2 years working for the government. Conditions in the camps established to the south and west of Railway Dam were hard with no running water or sewerage. My friend John Zabajnik recalled that his family was lucky as they had a sleeper floor in their tent, while most coped with bare ground.
Many of these people obtained their own house, and remained in Narrogin to become leading citizens.

The file below contains a fascinating account of the times and these resilient people.

In 1992 a jet boat course was excavated on the northern side of Railway Dam. Twice a year, water was pumped into the circuit from the dam for a time trial event. Public interest rapidly waned and it was abandoned after a couple of years. Nature is gradually reclaiming the course that hopefully will become an ephemeral wetland.

A rush-covered mildly saline area between Railway Dam and Federal Street is a haven for tent-web and St Andrews Cross spiders (both harmless) that becomes an amazing spider city panorama on dewy mornings.