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Records of Australian palaeoclimate beyond the last glacial cycle are rare, limiting detailed analysis of long‐term climate trends and associated ecosystem responses. This study analyses a discontinuous pollen and charcoal record from Fern Gully Lagoon, North Stradbroke Island (Minjerribah), subtropical Queensland, Australia, which covers much of the last ~210 ,000 years. Climate variation is inferred from changes in vegetation, while analysis of micro‐ and macrocharcoal is used to infer fire activity. Pollen assemblages consist of ~40% rainforest taxa during marine isotope stage (MIS) 7a–c and early MIS 5. These are inferred to result from high rainfall in the Australian subtropics, which was also evident in north‐east and central Australia. Human impact from 21 ,000 years ago likely supressed post‐MIS 2 rainforest expansion to some extent. However, the increased Holocene abundance of herbs and grasses and reduced representation of aquatic taxa suggest that the Holocene was relatively dry when compared with early MIS 5 and MIS 7a–c. Similar MIS 5 and early MIS 7a–c climates, in contrast to a notably drier Holocene, suggest that the progressive interglacial drying trend most strongly recorded in central Australia was not a major feature of subtropical eastern Australian climates.

697SCIENCE sciencemag.org E very day from my work desk, I look upon a boring and uneventful tableau: a cluster of gray and brown buildings, some of them tall; half-filled parking lots; and rooftop duct-work. It is almost unremittingly without consequence, but occasionally, a peregrine falcon slices through it like a gray blade.Books like Gods of the Morning by John Lister-Kaye make the waiting between sightings easier. From his remote, altitudinous home in Scotland, where he operates the Aigas Field Centre, the English naturalist has written a magical book-a poetic celebration of the many different birds that own the wild air around him.For almost 40 years-since the center was opened in 1977-Lister-Kaye has perched with his family at Aigas, watching the seasons change. For decades, the different bird species have arrived and departed again with such cyclical regularity that Lister-Kaye could tell what month it was by their movements. No longer.First, he finds a lonely and diminutive blackcap in September. It had flown into a window and died. The rest of the blackcaps had left already, migrating south to Spain and Italy and warmer temperatures. This one had stayed behind. Twenty-five years earlier, blackcaps themselves had heralded a change in the glen, arriving unexpectedly. Now, Lister-Kaye wonders if they have begun to miss their migratory cues to leave when the weather grows cold.Next, the rooks appeared a full season early in a noisy black tangle to take up their usual nesting spots in the lime trees. Lister-Kaye writes: "What had brought them to my bathroom window, to dance and haggle through the un-leafing tree tops, to soar and plunge and cry among the striping rays of the lowering sun? Just what else was going on?" What follows is Lister-Kaye's year-long rumination on the changes he has seen-and continues to see-and the factors that might be causing them.As the years have passed, Lister-Kaye has watched the waders gradually disappear from the moorland-along with the curlew, the lapwing, the greenshank, and the others. The short-eared owls are gone from the grassland; the hen harriers are gone from the meadow; the oystercatchers are gone from the river.In the prologue, he admits that he had not planned to write this book; instead, he was compelled by the environmental changes he has observed. Wary of blaming what he sees squarely on climate change, Lister-Kaye writes: "But I cannot deny that in the last few years it would appear that the pace of climate change has accelerated and we have entered a period of total weather unpredictability."Lister-Kaye watches the greylag geese pass overhead in V-shaped formation on their way to Iceland to breed. They are a month late. The swallows arrive from Africa a month early. Can the birds handle the changes?In weighty, burnished prose, Lister-Kaye describes it all unflinchingly: the change, the loss, the disruption, the bodies. It is an old man's book. Lister-Kaye, who is 69 years old, is a wise and gentle soul, at one with the land he has lived on for 40 years. His w...