Southwest Australia woodlands

Giant reed (Arundo donax) has been observed at two separate locations along the Swan River this year — a fresh sighting on the Mounts Bay Road foreshore three days ago, and two earlier records from Maylands in April. At five metres tall and spreading aggressively by rhizome fragments carried downstream in winter flows, this is one of the world's most destructive riparian invaders.The timing of winter sighting is important: fragments travel farthest in high flows, and the weed stays conspicuously green while native understorey dies back, making this the best season to locate it. The same riverbank habitat holds Flooded Gum, a native tree that iNaturalist flags as threatened, recorded three times this month alone. Giant reed is known to alter soil chemistry and hydrology in ways that make riparian recovery difficult even after removal — a concern worth keeping in mind given the co-occurrence of both species within the same stretch of riverbank, and one that underscores why early detection matters here.

Winter donkey orchid (Acanthus cladostachyus) is in flower at Kings Park — a single research-grade sighting recorded on July 15 in the Poole Track bushland. The species earns its common name honestly: brumalis means midwinter in Latin, and this orchid blooms only during the coldest, shortest days of the year, timed to a season when almost nothing else flowers.Its presence in the remnant Swan Coastal Plain scrub depends on far more than cold weather alone. These terrestrial orchids require specific mycorrhizal fungi in the soil to germinate and establish — delicate underground partners that vanish quickly when the understorey is disturbed. The Noongar people mark this time as Makuru, the cold and fertile season, reading the landscape through precisely these kinds of small, specific signals: the tiny orchids, the fungi, the timing. Seeing one here, in a fragment of native bush surrounded by a city, is evidence that enough of the old seasonal machinery is still running.

Indo-Pacific Bottlenose Dolphins (Tursiops aduncus) continue to appear year-round in Cockburn Sound, with fourteen sightings logged since January—most recently on July 6. These are animals of remarkable persistence, moving through an embayment transformed by decades of industrial pollution and habitat loss.The numbers tell a stark story: the sound lost roughly ninety percent of its seagrass meadows between the 1960s and 1990s as the Kwinana industrial strip developed along the shore. What was once perhaps 4,000 hectares of productive seagrass has dwindled to roughly 400. The dolphins' presence here is not a sign of recovery—the habitat remains devastated—but rather an act of ecological endurance, a reminder that some species will attempt to persist in places we have radically diminished.

Carnaby's Black Cockatoos (Zanda latirostris) are deep into their winter run — daily sightings across the past week, with 58 records since May marking a sustained influx. These endangered parrots breed inland across the wheatbelt, then push west each winter to forage in coastal banksia scrub, a migration shaped by the shifting availability of nectar and seed.This narrow strip of heathland sandwiched between ocean and suburbs has become one of their most critical refuges. The birds depend on the flowering cycles of native shrubs here, particularly banksias, which produce the energy-dense resources they need to survive the cold months. As coastal development fragments what remains of their winter range, the persistence of this foraging area and the health of its flowering plants grow more essential to the species' survival each year.

Ghost fungus (Omphalotus nidiformis) is putting on its winter display across the southwest — 36 sightings logged from Kings Park to the jarrah foothills near Kalamunda over the past month and a half. Australia's only bioluminescent mushroom emerges wherever dead jarrah wood lies on the woodland floor, breaking it down into soil nutrient while glowing a faint, unmistakable green in the darkness.This seasonal pulse is quiet work — the fungus fruiting in winter's cool, damp months when the forest floor is saturated and decomposition runs at its steadiest pace. Each cap is a small engine of nutrient cycling, feeding on cellulose and lignin that would otherwise lie inert, shuffling carbon and nitrogen back into the ecosystem's foundation. For anyone walking these woods at night, it is nature's own bioluminescence, needing no electricity to illuminate the underside of logs.

The light is still warm at eight in the evening in Perth's bushland in summer. The longest days push sunset late, and the heat that built through the afternoon sits in the leaf litter, rising off the sandy soil in waves you can feel at ankle height. This is when the quenda comes out.The quenda is a southern brown bandicoot, a small marsupial about the size of a rabbit, with a pointed snout, coarse brown fur, and back feet built for digging. It is threatened across its range, and the Perth bushland is one of the places where it still holds on. It is not a grazer or a browser. It is a digger and a hunter. The quenda moves through the understorey with its nose pressed close to the ground, reading the soil. When it detects something beneath the surface, it drives its snout down and excavates a small conical hole, a few centimetres across, with a speed that looks almost mechanical. Then it moves on. In good habitat, the ground behind a foraging quenda is pocked with these small diggings, each one the record of a successful find.What it finds is invertebrates. Beetle larvae, earthworms, fungi, the occasional spider or centipede. In summer, the soil community is active. Insects are breeding, larvae are developing underground, and the warm nights push invertebrate movement closer to the surface. The quenda is well suited to exploit this. Its long claws break compacted soil easily, and its snout is sensitive enough to locate prey that is not moving and not visible. It works by smell and by feel. The late dusk of summer suits it: enough light to navigate, enough warmth to keep the invertebrates accessible, and a window of activity before the larger predators that hunt by sound and movement are fully active.The quenda's digging does more than feed it. Each small excavation turns over the soil, mixing organic material downward and exposing the mineral layer beneath. In the jarrah and banksia woodland around Perth, this kind of low-level disturbance is part of how the soil stays aerated and how fungal spores get redistributed. The quenda feeds on hypogeal fungi, the kind that fruit underground, and carries spores through the landscape in its gut. Those spores are later deposited elsewhere, sometimes far from where they were consumed. The acorn banksia and firewood banksia that grow here depend on mycorrhizal fungi in the soil to take up phosphorus from the nutrient-poor sand. The quenda, moving through the understorey at dusk, is part of that system. Its foraging and the health of the banksia canopy are connected through the soil.The laughing kookaburra, an invasive species introduced to Western Australia from the east, is active at this hour too, and it takes small vertebrates, lizards, and the occasional young marsupial. The presence of kookaburras in Perth bushland is one of several pressures the quenda contends with, alongside fox predation and habitat fragmentation. But at dusk, in intact scrub with dense understorey, the quenda moves in cover. It is not often seen. If you are near low banksia scrub or regenerating bush right now, look for the small conical diggings in exposed sandy soil. They are easier to find than the animal that made them.The ghost fungus grows on dead wood in this bushland, and in the long summer evenings it is faintly visible after dark, a pale luminescence on the bark of old logs. The quenda passes these without interest. It is looking for something that moves, or something that smells like it recently did. The sky above the canopy is still blue at the horizon. The air smells of warm eucalyptus resin and dry sand. Somewhere in the understorey, a small animal is pushing its nose into the ground.