​Greetings fellow Foxies
Whinbin Nature Reserve adjoins Whinbin Rock about 20km east of Highbury on the (sealed) Whinbin Road. Although only 38 hectares in size its strategic location on a ridge provides a valuable bird breeding refuge within substantially cleared farmland. About a quarter of the reserve had been mined for gravel and sand, but this area has been replanted, and trees and other vegetation elsewhere is in good condition.

There are a range of land types, with the most common being sandy and loamy gravels, tall woodland loams and sandy duplex. There are no waterways or sheoak jam country that signifies good orchid country. On my two visits I found greenhoods, cowslips and a few fringed mantis orchids.
There are no internal or boundary roads or tracks apart from one on the south-western side that leads from Whinbin Road to a renovated sand pit.
​The northern side of the reserve has little interest for bushwalkers apart from a line of salmon gums with a few delightful understorey plants. I was surprised to see a grevillea on that loamy soil, but the plant, Grevillea huegelii is found further east.

​A walk through the southern side of the reserve takes one through kwongan bush with scattered mallees, on open wandoo on the western side, and a breakaway on the eastern side. Below the breakaway, the country varies from dense blue and brown mallet, open woodland and tammar gravel to the north east. 

​I suggest a visit to this reserve from mid-August to mid- September when many of the bushes are flowering and before kangaroo ticks become active. There is a good WIFI signal for Telstra users you can track your location using Google Maps

Greetings fellow Foxies,
Last week after rain, I discovered a lichen with a raised milky-white centre. After trying to convince people that I had found the rare “Poached Egg Lichen”, I was politely informed that the white mass was a False Puffball Reticularia Lycerpodon that just happened to form its spore mass on a lichen.
This is a type of slime mould that is distinctive in forming a tough ‘skin’ on its powdery spore mass (sporangium) to resemble a puffball. The skin became obvious as the sporangium dried.
It is quite unusual to find slime moulds in November. As their name signifies, they move around in wet weather, (mostly winter) as slimy threads of protoplasm called plasmodium, that group together to form fruiting bodies (sporangia). If conditions become very dry when this species is in the plasmodial stage it is able to survive as a dry dormant resting body called a sclerotium. When wet weather returns the sclerotium changes to the plasmodial stage to feed before forming a sporangium at the end of the season.
Note that there are two lichen species on the bark. The large one faded from sea green to greenish grey as it dried, but the small one retained its light green colour.

​Despite many years of wandering around Foxes Lair and surrounds I still make new discoveries that excite my imagination.
A Buddhist saying goes “If a fool persists in his folly. He may become a wise man”
Let us hope it works!
p.s. The saying is equally applicable to all genders.

Some years ago, a visiting Scot remarked that our granite rocks looked old and tired compared with the ones at his homeland. I had to agree. Unlike Scotland, our Yilgarn craton bedrock has been stable for millions of years. No geologically recent volcanism or mountain building events. And best of all no haggis!
 Granite is mostly created when geological plates collide and one slips under the other (subduction, see this blog).
WA granites formed over 2 billion years ago

The bedrock has fractured many times as the craton was compressed and cracked during supercontinent cycles. Intact solid rock outcrops like Yilliminning rock are less frequent in the district. Most granite outcrops have horizontal and vertical cracks (called joints), which weather to large boulder heaps and cracked rock outcrops.

The vertical joints are obvious on an aerial photo, as ridges and valleys that often trend east/west, northeast/ southwest, north/south or northwest/southeast, and make right angle turns. 
Locally, the most obvious area is southwest of Narrogin, where much of the old laterite cover has been removed and soil has formed on basement rock.
Newman Block is a great example. Lines of vegetation reflect changes in the granite ‘grain’ as well as faults and dykes. The image on the left of pallid zone clay on a ridge displays an amazing number of joints that are in the underlying bedrock.
Eager to learn why the joints follow particular directions I started reading on and on and on…… It is a long and fascinating story. 

​Our local bedrock has a northwest/southeast trend or ‘grain’ from the formation of the Yilgarn Craton as ‘islands’ of continental rock collided about 2.8 billion years ago. The red lines between the domaines/ and terranes show subduction zones where one slid under the other as they collided. These zones are called orogens.
The orogens on the north, northeast and southwest sides formed when the Yilgarn Craton collided with other land masses as the Australian continent was being built up. The Pinjarra orogen on the west side has had at least three collisions with other land masses including the Zimbabwe craton and India.

During this time, the craton has joined and separated from at least three supercontinents as it has drifted over the globe.
The images below show the position the WA in three supercontinents before they split apart. I have taken the liberty of rotating the supercontinents so that WA is in its present north/south orientation. 
The radiating multi-coloured lines on the Nuna supercontinent are joints caused by pressure from mantle hotspots that have filled with intrusive rock to form dykes (see this blog). These also affect the direction of joints in continental rocks.

After India separated from WA, reduction of weight from the combined continents on the underlying mantle created an upward pressure that caused the Darling Range to slowly rise on the west coast accompanied by parallel faults inland. Antatrctica's separation caused a line of uplift parallel to the south coast (Jarrahwood Axis) and east/west trending faults. Formerly south-flowing rivers to reversed flow and now eventually join the Swan River. On the south side of this uplift the coast slumped forming a slope down to the ocean.
The Australian plate is inexorably drifting north and is subducting underneath the Eurasian Plate. In a couple of hundred million years Darwin could be a suburb underneath Bali, or possibly a ski resort! This subduction is extremely slowly causing the Northern Australian coastline to sink, and the south coastline to rise (unfortunately not as fast a sea level rise from climate warming).
Stress from tilting of the Australian Plate is a cause of earthquakes like the Meckering quake.

About 300 million years ago glaciers flattened the landscape. For hundreds of millions of years the top of our granite bedrock has been very slowly breaking down to soil that has been washed or blown away. Overall, long term erosion has lowered the ground level by up to 5 km in this area.
​From about 100 million years ago, laterite has formed a layer over the landscape. Subsequent climate cycles and land movements have  created our present pattern of riges and waterways. More resistant laterites formed from mafic rock tend to coincide with uplands, and the very angular waterway patterns are following ancient cracks in the underlying bedrock.
This is shown on the relief map of the district below. Note the north/morthwest south/southwest cracks to the west, which formed with the Darling Range uplift.

It is no wonder that our granites look old and tired, but they create interesting landscape patterns.