page_title: Toolibin Lake
section_title: Flora and fauna
hierarchical_section_title: Toolibin Lake / Flora and fauna
caption_attribution_description: Phascogale calura
context_page_description: Toolibin Lake is a seasonal fresh to brackish water perched lake or wooded swamp, in south-western Australia. The lake is contained with a 493-hectare nature reserve and it is located about 200 kilometres south-east of Perth, in the Shire of Narrogin, and 40 kilometres east of the town of Narrogin, in the Wheatbelt region of Western Australia. The lake is listed by the Australian Government as a threatened ecological community under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999.
context_section_description: Toolibin is the only remaining example in Southwest Australia of a wetland with extensive living thickets of swamp sheoak and the paperbark Melaleuca strobophylla on the lake fringes and bed - one of the main wetland types in the region prior to agricultural development there. Flooded gum, acorn banksia and rock sheoak woodland occur on the higher ground and deep sands surrounding the lake. The vegetation includes submerged aquatic plants and sedges around the lake.
  The vegetation community provides habitat, now rare in the central wheatbelt, for woodland birds and other animals. Toolibin and its environs support more breeding waterbird species — up to 25, including the rare freckled duck, cormorants, egrets, night herons and spoonbills — than any other inland wetland in south-western Australia.  It also supports a population of the threatened red-tailed phascogale.
caption: Red-tailed phascogale
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