​Greetings fellow Foxies,
Over the years, the Claypit has been a labour of love and source of frustration. The reason for the existence of the twin excavations is unknown, with possibilities being a brick clay quarry (unlikely as it is poor quality clay, borrow pit for adjoining Bottle Creek dam or as a soak. The initial name, Beavers Dam was also a mystery until several years after I renamed it Claypit for brevity. Guy Maley told me that he and other kids used to throw sticks in the water, which were were blown by wind into one end to resemble a beaver’s dam.
 Images below show changes from 2011 to 2019

 The Claypit was a favoured place for tadpole collecting, a cycle circuit, trail bike jumps and 4WD enthusiasts. After many years of vandalism, and trail bike and 4WD incursions on walk trails and through the bush, I realised that Foxes Lair would never be a good place for walkers while the Claypit remained a magnet for undesirable activity exponents
Tony and Deb Hughes-Owen donated bridge timbers that were placed by the Central South Naturalist Club to create a picnic area. In a battle of attrition over several years, 4WD drivers would breach the barriers and trash facilities and I would repair them and cart in tonnes of rocks, logs, soil for landscaping, barrier reinforcements, and stepping stones. Images below show a 2016 incident 

​The famous “Claypit Challenge” arose after I scabbed rocks, logs, and limestone blocks from a range of sources to create a stepping stone circuit for the young and young at heart.
Recently the shire’s insurance assessor cast an eye over and (justifiably) insisted that the logs and rocks were a safety hazard and had to go. 

Narrogin shire donated 8 one metre long reconstituted limestone blocks, and will hopefully cut them in half .
 However more blocks are needed. Suitable limestone blocks would be gratefully accepted by yours truly

​Greetings fellow Foxies,
                                     When the Friends of Foxes Lair group formed in 1999, Foxes Lair was much neglected. Numerous tracks were used as a rally circuit for trail bikes, 4WD and other vehicles, and it was used for dumping rubbish, and fireside drinking parties.
The group developed a management plan and got to work. A few years later when 30 years of regrowth was cut out to restore the arboretum, I realised that we had no before and after photos to record the tremendous progress that we had made.
I have set up a reference sites throughout Foxes Lair that are photographed regularly.
Progress over the years has been 2 steps forward and one step back.
Despite this, images of the Marri picnic area below indicate significant progress. The yellow arrow shows the same tree in each image.
In 2003 the picnic area was an evening speedway circle with spectators in the centre. Roads radiated out in four directions. The concrete picnic table was then destroyed by someone using a sledge hammer.

​With shire assistance we designed and built a car park using boulders and telephone pole bases to separate vehicles from the picnic area and used converted roads into the three walking trails. One night a group used the poles for a bonfire (and got a good dose of arsenic from the wood preservative).

​More boulders were brought in to create the barrier that you see now. 

​In 2010 we obtained a Lotteries Commission grant for an information bay and a new picnic table (far left) 

​In recent years Narrogin Shire has installed two new picnic tables (one under cover)

​The Narrogin shire is in the final stage of producing a trails master plan, which will provide a blueprint for future upgrades to Foxes Lair trails. A long overdue replacement map poster should be in place by June.

Greetings fellow Foxies, 
The arboretum is a great place to see how diverse eucalypts can be, with one feature being whether/how they shed their bark each summer.
Eucalyptus leptopoda; Merredin mallee (formerly Tammin mallee, pegs 472 to 475) is a lovely plant that is common on gravel and sandplain soils in the Eastern Wheatbelt. There they have grey/white smooth bark with darker strips of old bark. Today I noticed long shreds of shed bark up to 3 metres long hanging down from upper branches of plants in the arboretum, with light copper new bark that will gradually turn grey white.

Mallees are adapted to cope with regular fires by regenerating from a large lignotuber root, but the arboretum specimens have shaggy bark stem bases and long spindly stems that are beginning to snap.

For more information on eucalypts you can’t go past the brilliant book "Eucalypts of Western Australia’s wheatbelt" by Malcolm French.