​Greetings fellow Foxies,
Despite an exceptionally dry summer and autumn, we have had over 90mm of rain since mid June. If it all soaked in it would wet the soil to at least 2.5 metres. There has been relatively little runoff and I was gobsmacked, and very concerned to find dry soil within 5cm when digging side-drains on a range of soil types on walking trails to reduce erosion. These soils are massively water-repellent.

If the water largely didn’t run away, where did it go? Many of our native plants have excellent strategies for channelling water down their roots, and an experiment I did some years ago showed the importance of obstructing surface water flow to allow time for water to overcome the water repellence. The image below shows a section of water repellent soil where a racehorse goanna had been burrowing for insects in an old root channel. Note how moisture has wet the soil to depth around the root channel.

​I read this great article about the importance of woylies in the regeneration of sandalwood and native poisons. No doubt emus were also important.
​
Woylies and emus have gone from most of our reserves with the only burrowing animals being rabbits, reptiles and  echidnas. This is having a massive impact. Over time as plants die leaving bare ground and roots rot away there is less chance that new plants will replace them unless conditions change.

I commented on  irreversible changes in small reserves previously, and feel sad about the ongoing loss of nesting trees.
When entering Foxes Lair from opposite the caravan park, one can see poorer shrub and wildflower growth on the left side that hasn’t been burnt for over 50 years on the left, compared to vibrant growth on the right where an arsonist burnt about a third of the reserve.
That fire was a real revelation for me, as it triggered orchids I hadn’t previously seen and rejuvenated small bird life such as  quail that hide in dense undergrowth.
The arsonist had several goes in Foxes Lair After a small attempt I noticed a smouldering front moving through the soil under marri that burnt the water repellent organic surface layer to a depth of 3cm, and after the arsonist’s finale the fire continued to burn along underground tree roots for about 3 weeks (lesson here don’t walk through burnt country soon after a fire – your foot can plunge into underground burning root). The images below shows the difference burning made on the Valley Walk.

​What can be realistically done by volunteers and local government in small reserves?
 
Over time I have developed the following achievable strategies in Foxes Lair.

• Proper low intensity mosaic burns, with raking around big standing dead trees that are vital nesting spots. I developed a 10 plus year interval burning program for blocks in the reserve (no luck with implementation so far).
•  When pruning is required or trees fall across tracks etc. prunings are placed on bare areas to help trap water (amazing how quickly the leaves disappear).
• Dig small side drains at short intervals along trails and roads to return water to the bush more evenly.
• Spread soil from these side drains on to bare areas to introduce and retain seed and help water infiltration.
• Control weeds (so many).
• At the rate that large nesting trees are falling over, I reckon that nesting boxes will be needed one day.

I still remember being appalled at the lack of bird diversity when I travelled overland from India to Turkey a lifetime ago. Just sparrows,pigeons, crows and vultures!
​ I would hate Australia to go down that route.

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,
                                     Recently I climbed Yilliminning rock in the evening which is a great time to gain an understanding of its formation. There is a great story in the rock itself if you look closely.
Most continents in the world consist mainly of granite (a light coloured quartz and feldspar rich rock that crystallised out from molten magma (igneous rock). The continents are separated by black dense crystalline rock (a bit like dolerite used for road building) that underlies ocean floors.
 I suspect that the granite here formed up to two thousand million years ago (your ancestral line may have been bacteria then) when two geological plates were colliding. As one slowly slid underneath the other it was forced into deep molten rock of the mantle and gradually melted.
Being lighter, large domes of molten granite gradually forced their way upwards. They moved upwards through solid rock by “cauldron subsidence”. Intense heat from dome magma causes rock above to fracture and fall into the magma, creating a chamber that the magma moves into. Fractured rock from top and sides is often incorporated into the dome as partially melted xenoliths.
If they reach the surface, volcanoes spew out a fine grained granite like rock called andesite. However most times the domes stop two kilometers (km) or more below the land surface and gradually solidify into granite. You can tell that it cooled slowly because granite has large evenly spaced crystals.
 
Just think about it. As you stand on the top of Yilliminning Rock, you are 2 km below an ancient land surface.
 
The diagram on left shows ocean crust melting in the hot mantle after it has collided with and been forced underneath a continent. Molten material separates into dense black gabbro and lighter granite that rises towards the surface of the continent by cauldron subsidence.

​Like most of the large granite outcrops in the wheatbelt, Yilliminning Rock is an inselberg (steep sided dome of bedrock that has been exposed above the surface as surrounding land eroded away).
If you wander over the surface you can see the relatively uniform speckled pale crystalline granite.
But look carefully, and you will see more.
Yilliminning rock contains lots of roughly north-west/south-east corrugations that are easily seen at dusk as shadows define them. Simplistically, I think that these could be due to slight differences in rock composition from

• Magma intruding cracks in the cooling rock.
• Changes in crystal size and possibly mineral composition that occurred due to temperature and pressure changes as the granite slowly cooled while still molten.

The huge sheets of rock are geologically a very recent, and form in a process called exfoliation. Basically, granite is a very poor conductor of heat, and hot-cold temperature variations cause onion skin type cracks.
In winter, cracks expands as water in them freezes. Voila, a great home for Ornate Dragon Lizards (Ctenophorus ornatus). Eventually gravity and vibration/ pressure from earth movements (or more commonly humans) causes these sheets to break off and move downslope (or be crushed or carted away by humans!)
 The image below shows granite structure in a broken sheet

​Images below show rock sheet on the northern side of the rock. If you sit quietly, the dragon lizards (mini dragons really!) will come out. Watch them bobbing up and down to warn off intruders and running around on their tippy toes (evolved to help them avoid heat from hot rocks

Here are some great references
Geology of Granite
Overview of Granite Outcrops in Western Australia

Greetings fellow Foxies,
A knowledge of the underlying rocks and their history explains why the landscape and vegetation of Foxes Lair changes more over a short area than other places like Dryandra Yilliminning and Harrismith.
I guess that you need a good imagination to picture continental plates smashing together and separating again to repeatedly form and destroy supercontinents over hundreds of millions of years, and the associated earthquakes, volcanoes and mountain ranges that have formed and then weathered away.
Geology is very relevant!
 For example did you know that Darwin could be a suburb in Indonesia in 500 million years, and a visit to Bali will be a different experience, as it may be a new Mt Everest or a blob of melting rock underneath the encroaching Australasian plate?.
So here is a very simplified story!
In the wheatbelt we are on the Yilgarn Craton, a very old and stable slab of mainly granite (sandy soils) with greenstone strips (red soils, mineral fields). Since its formation (2,800 million years ago?) the craton has been stressed as it and then as part of Australia has collided with others to form supercontinents and then separated again at least five times.
These stresses caused faults in the bedrock and cracks that filled with magma from the earth’s mantle that we commonly see today as narrow lines of black rock (like dolerite) containing dark minerals that form reddish loam and clay soils (dykes).
About 2,400 million years ago a series of east/west dykes formed, with the biggest being the huge Binneringie Dyke (600 km long and up to 3km wide. The dyke aligns with the road from Quindanning to Williams and then the Williams Kondinin Road and on to Hyden and further east. Commonly driving on these main roads, I used to overestimate the amount of red soil in the district, but one soon comes into sandy soils on side roads
Narrogin and Foxes Lair sit right on this dyke that can be seen from the air as a discontinuous often double line of hills. The hills have resulted from intruded magma ‘cooking’ the surrounding rock making it more resistant to erosion, and stonier more resistant laterites formed on dolerites remaining as the surrounding landscape eroded away. The line is discontinuous because the extruded magma formed different rock types from quartz to ultramafic rock, and the dyke has since been cut by numerous younger faults and dykes.

Surrounding areas like Dryandra are mainly on granites crossed by smaller dolerite dykes (often as ridges such as on Candy Block).
Granite is actually an interesting rock. Here it formed by the collision of continental blocks. As one block slides under another it melts and huge “pools” of granite rise up and solidify as large domes like Yilliminning rock up to 2 kilometres below the surface of the plate above.
You can climb Yilliminning Rock now because over the hundreds of millions of years the overlying kilometres of bedrock have weathered and the soil washed away into the ocean.

Mind blowing stuff!
 Some light reading- Geology of Granite , Overview of Granite Outcrops
The image below shows my guesstimate of the Binneringie Dyke at Narrogin.