Speciation in Birds

This is an insightful and original work, comprehensive and up to date, covers many interesting ideas, and is particularly good on inclusion of recent genetic information on the process of speciation in birds. It will be the best work available on its topic, the behavioral and genetic causes and consequences of speciation in birds. -- Robert Payne Curator of Birds and Professor of Zoology, University of Michigan Museum of Zoology An insightful and thought-provoking treatise on speciation and its consequences in birds, the taxon that brought you the biological species concept and the doctrine of allopatric speciation. This book delivers a grand update that expands our understanding of the role of ecology and behavior. -- Dolph Schluter Professor and Canada Research Chair, University of British Columbia, and the author of The Ecology of Adaptive Radiation As the literature in any field explodes there is simultaneously an increasing need for synthesis yet an increasing difficulty in achieving it. This is certainly true for the ever-popular subject of ornithology. Trevor Price takes up the challenge to explain how birds speciate, and succeeds magnificently. It is a comprehensive review of all the major ideas, beautifully illustrated with pictures of birds. More than 1300 works are cited, but more impressive is the range of subjects, from genetics to biogeography, from the reconstruction of phylogeny to ecology and the causes of reproductive isolation, all discussed with admirable clarity. If they were alive today Ernst Mayr would bestow patrician approval on this work of scholarship, and Theodosius Dobzhansky would applaud from the side-lines. -- Peter R. Grant Class of 1877 Professor of Zoology, Princeton University, and the author of Ecology and Evolution of Darwin's Finches