Greetings fellow Foxies,
These plants belong to the Casuarinaceae family and are instantly recognised by their needle- like foliage and the wonderful sighing sound of the wind passing through them. Around Narrogin we tend to notice the trees most: Rock sheoak; Allocasuarina huegeliana on well drained soils, and salt sheoak; Casuarina obesa in semi saline lakes and waterways. A bed of sheoak needles with a whispering wind overhead is a wonderful place for courting couples (after they have repelled the ants, ticks and mosquitos). The name casuarina is derived from the Malay word for cassowary, due to similarities of layered feathers/ needles. If you look closely at a needle you will notice rings of scales that are the true leaves. The green needles are in fact photosynthesizing stems.
Tammas or tammars, are bushy plants that become dominant on gravelly soils general east of a line through Yealering and Harrismith.
 
A feature of them all is that they have boy and girl plants, but differ from the animal world in that the girls have the nuts (that look like cones). Casuarinas and Allocasuarinas have subtle differences in nut structure.
Males produce pollen that is blown by wind to female flowers. Like most wind pollinated species, huge amounts of pollen are produced, and you will notice now green female and orange pollen- bearing males everywhere.
The vast majority of plants in the bush have root modifications (cluster or proteoid roots) and alliances with fungi (mycorrhizas) to forage for phosphorus and/or gain water from tiny soil pores.
Plants on poor sand or gravel soils mainly have cluster roots that are also instrumental in forming gravels.
Eucalypts and other plants on more fertile soils mainly use mycorrhizas.
Casuarinaceae have cluster roots, ectomycorrhizas (where the fungus does not invade the plant root), AND nodules where bacteria produce nitrogen like legumes. They are truly adaptable plants.
 
Rock sheoak is a particularly aggressive colonising species. The name comes from them originally being most common around granite rocks, but they have spread greatly on roadsides and other well drained areas where trees have been removed. I frequently see roads with remnant wandoo vegetation on one side of a road and rock sheoak thicket on the disturbed other side. The  PDF below shows images relevant to this district

There are lots of tammas (all Allocasuarinas), particularly on kwongan gravels, but they are often overlooked because they don’t have conventional flowers. Foxes lair has dwarf sheoak; Allocasuarina humilis on gravels and Allocasuarina microstachyia that only occurs on the south side of the Claypit.
My favourite is the compass bush; Allocasuarina pinaster that occurs in the Lake Grace area on grey sandy gravels. The nearest Location is Holden Road near Tarin Rock. See me for location.

Greetings fellow Foxies,
Puffballs belong to a group called Gasteroid fungi that lack an open cap with spore-bearing gills. Instead, spores are produced internally, in a spheroidal fruiting body as a fleshy mass that changes to powdery, water repellent spores. A hole often usually forms in the skin at the top, and pressure from raindrops causes the pores to puff out and disperse. The skin can split to reveal a powdery mass that can end up as a soggy mess.
Many are edible at the firm stage. When I was at uni I had a great mycology (fungi study) lecturer who showed us the edible fungi in the suburbs. Much to my mother’s horror I picked a heap of white puffballs from the front lawn then sliced and fried them. The taste was nothing special but I was unaffected.
False truffles belong to another group that produce underground fruiting bodies that emit a smell that attracts small marsupials like woylies. They dig them up and eat them and spread the spores in their dung. There are no woylies left in Foxes Lair, but I have recently seen similar groups of holes that must have been dug by kangaroos.
 
The images below show a large puffball with stages of spore release.
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Greetings fellow Foxies,
                                       For months I had been intrigued by dewy fairy house webs that form sheets across the ground from the base of a low plant in open country. At first I attempted to return to a web after the dew had gone to find that it had disappeared. After worrying about early onset dementia I tagged the spot and returned again to find a small hole in the ground and realised that the spider ate its web each morning to recycle the precious silk for an evening spin.
Anyway I returned again with the next dew with a supply of flies and pill bugs and almost froze my butt off dropping them into webs and waiting for a magnificent trapdoor type spider to leap out. After waiting and waiting, I realised that the occupant was an exceptionally shy and squirty specimen that would go after prey several times its size but disappear whenever I tried to take a photo.
Patience prevailed and I was able to get an image good enough to identify it as a tangle-web spider (Theridiidae family Steatoda species.) that is faintly related to the redback spider (Latrodectus species). They are called false widows in some countries but are not at all dangerous – particularly this reclusive individual!