Ant business

Near the bird table I noticed a pile of what appeared to be sawdust at the base of a tree. It was. Although a dusting rather than a pile.

In a crack a metre or so up the trunk were many black ants (no idea of the species), working hard at bringing out crumbs of tree that they’d dug from inside, and dropping them to the ground.

I’ll try to replace the ants’ picture with a better one but it might be a while before they’re working so feverishly again – I took this one a few hours before we had three days of rain.

More fungus

I’ve seen references to Aborigines using the fungus Laetiporus portentosus as a means of carrying fire with them. It apparently smoulders for a long time.

This large growth – strictly speaking fruit – appears irregularly on one of my older trees (Narrow-leaf Peppermint, Eucalyptus radiata). It is perhaps 300 mm across the base. I’m not sure whether age, weather, birds or insects are responsible for its dilapidated appearance. It’s smooth when it first appears.

 

 

The tree trunk was charred in the fire and even though the fungus was quite a way above the charring it seems to have caught fire. I can’t see the remains on the ground so I suppose it completely burned away.

EVCs

Ecological Vegetation Classes (EVCs) are benchmark classifications of typical vegetation communities occurring in specific geomorphological and climatic situations. However, one EVC can have different benchmark species depending on which bioregion it is in. Kangaroo Creek runs solely through the Central Victorian Uplands bioregion.

The Department of Sustainability & Environment (as was) put a lot of work into classifying the many bioregions and many more EVCs in the state, in anticipation of a classification and planning scheme that eventually failed to get through parliament.

Below is the DSE map of EVCs in my area. You can work out where my place is by comparing this to the maps in the previous (above) post..

The two EVCs on my place are EVC 23: Herb-rich foothill forest and EVC 164: Creekline herb-rich woodland. My place has been assessed against its EVCs by the Trust for Nature (with whom I have a Conservation Covenant) and the DSE’s Bush Tender programme. It did reasonably well but is missing a lot of smaller sub-story plants. I blame wallabies.

This is what the DSE estimated to be the EVCs in 1750. (This is a closer view than the map above.) For some reason 1750 rather than 1788 is used by ecologists as the cut-off year for the ‘natural’ Australian environment. The type and even the extent of the EVCs on my place is unchanged, but that doesn’t mean that my vegetation actually meets the EVC benchmarks.

Weeds

This post will be an updating record of weeds as they appear.

First seems to be dock (Broadleaf Dock, Rumex obtusifolius), which was a bit surprising as it is in an area where I hadn’t noticed dock before. But judging by the size of the roots they aren’t new seedlings.

25 March 2014

Spear Thistle (Cirsium vulgare) lurking under a log. One of the banes of this property so I’m not surprised to see one so quickly. Luckily they are easy to spot in the burnt area.

 

 

 

 

I’d like to think that this was a native Yam Daisy (Microseris lanceolata) but it’s more likely to be one of the many types of flatweed I have. This one might be Cat’s Ear, Hypochaeris radicata.

If you enlarge this twice you can see what might be tiny insects in the petals.

 

 

30 March 2014

Looking innocently like a carrot or a type of parsley, this is in fact a new shoot of Helmlock (Conium maculatum). Very poisonous.

 

 

 

 

 

 

All of the other weeds are probably new shoots from established roots which survived the fire. But this one seems to be a new seedling. I have no idea what it will be but chances are it’s a weed.

 

 

 

 

Yep – spear thistle. Thousands of them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The plant on the left, below, might not actually be a weed – I think it’s Bidgee-Widgee  (Acaena novae-zelandiae) which, despite its name, is apparently native and indigenous to this area. The others are variations on the rosette-form (or rosettiform) weeds that are my most common.

 

 

 

 

 

 2 April 2014

And here come the blackberries …

‘Fire fungus’?

An orange fungus has appeared in many places where tussocks were. It looks like a thin layer of colour but when tapped sounds hollow, like a mushroom, so it might be the top of something larger underground (a shovel would clear up this point). I have a feeling that I’ve heard of fire fungus, but whether it’s fungus reacting well or badly to the fire I don’t (yet) know.

Third chance

It’s a bit hard to see from the photo but this tree (Candlebark, Eucalyptus rubida) grew from – and now almost surrounds – the big stump of an older tree. Or, rather, the tree which was cut down managed to grow again. The stump was charred, probably from the 15 January 1944 fire, the last big fire in this area.

Will this tree survive the damage from the much less severe 2014 fire? Almost certainly.

You can see that the tree (Messmate, Eucalyptus obliqua) in the background, unscathed by the 2014 fire, has also grown around charring, probably from the 1944 fire. Many of my older trees have this scarring in their base and it often forms a deep hollow. Trees with deep hollows in the base are often decayed for a long way up the inside of their trunk but I don’t know if that would occur anyway, charred hollow or not.

1944 fires

I had known about the fire in this area in 1944 but hadn’t realised that it was one of many big fires in Victoria that Friday and Saturday, which killed about 20 people. It doesn’t seem to have become a ‘named’ disaster (Black Saturday, Ash Wednesday, Black Friday). This might be because it was wartime.

Below are the Saturday 15 January and Monday 17 January Melbourne Argus front pages. On both days the fires are not the main story. As with almost all images on this blog, click to enlarge.

               

From the NLA’s Trove project.

One week later

First shoots in the poa.