Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Timeline
- Geological Ages
- Prologue: Evolution of an Idea

PART ONE: NON-PASSERINES
1. The Tinamou's Story: Death of a Paradigm
2. The Vegavis's Story: The Cradle of Modern Birds
3. The Waterfowl's Story: Refugia, High Living, and Sex
4. The Hoatzin's Story: An Improbable Voyage
5. The Penguin's Story: Phenotype and Environment
6. The Storm Petrel's Story: Sympatry versus Allopatry
7. The Albatross's Story: The Species Problem
8. The Godwit's Story:Quantum Compasses
9. The Buzzard's Story: Accidental Speciation
10. The Owl's Story: Nightlife
11. The Oilbird's Story: Evolutionary Distinctiveness
12. The Hummingbird's Story: A Route of Evanescence
13. The Parrot's Story: Vicariance and Dispersal

PART TWO: PASSERINES
14. The New Zealand Wren's Story: A Novel Foot
15. The Manakin's Story: Why so many Suboscines?
16. The Sapayoa's Story: Odd One Out
17. The Scrubbird's Story: Where Song Began
18. The Bowerbird's Story: Extended Phenotypes
19. The Crows' Story: Cognitive Skills
20. The Bird of Paradise's Story: Sexual Selection
21. The Starling's Story: Structural Colours
22. The Thrush's Story: Sweepstake Dispersals
23. The Sparrow's Story: Hybridisation and Speciation
24. The Zebra Finch's Story: Evolution of Birdsong
25. The Crossbill's Story: Adaptive Radiation and Coevolution
26. The White-eye's Story: Supertramps and Great Speciators
27. The Tanager's Story: A Final Flourish

Postscript: The Sixth Extinction
Appendix 1: Glossary
Dramatis Personae
Bibliography
Index

About the Author

Professor John Reilly has been a keen birder all his life, visiting over fifty countries and observing nearly half the world's bird species. In the late 1970s, he led several pioneering bird and wildlife tours to the Arctic island of Spitsbergen. Since developing an interest in avian evolution, he has concentrated on tracking down and photographing species that have important evolutionary stories to tell, birds that provide the key characters for each of the book's chapters.

After graduating in biochemistry and then medicine, John worked as a consultant haematologist in Sheffield for 25 years. In addition to teaching, lecturing and clinical work, he led an active research programme into the causes and treatment of various blood cancers, authoring over 200 scientific articles in peer-reviewed journals.

John's medical and scientific career, and time spent as a bird guide, enable him to present complex scientific concepts to the non-specialist - whether in the field of leukaemia or the evolution of birds.

In 2014, he retired from the NHS to concentrate on travelling and writing. This career change was encouraged by the success of his first book, Greetings from Spitsbergen: Tourists at the Eternal Ice (2009) published by Tapir Academic Press. In 2013 he established Svalbard Press, with the aim of publishing the histories of different countries as revealed by their early postcards. The first volume in the series, Spitsbergen's Early Postcards: an annotated catalogue, was published in 2014. Further volumes on Papua New Guinea and Greenland are in preparation.

Reviews

We expect to find well‐read copies of this book in libraries near famous birding locations across the globe, from Pipeline Road to Kinabalu National Park.
*Journal of Field Ornithology*

The Ascent of Birds is a fascinating story of bird history, a collection of exciting and readable essays on the development of different bird types from ancient times to the present and the future.
*Linnut*

While this book is a little daunting at first, covering as it does the entire evolutionary history of birds, the author does an excellent job of breaking the latest science down into understandable chunks, and I highly recommend it as an excellent synthesis of this amazing field of research. You won’t look at birds the same again.
*Canadian Field Naturalist*

Birds draw you in with flashy characteristics – dazzling colors, melodious songs, the power of flight. By the time you start to get inured to these you discover there is so much more. What’s the deal with all their diversity? Where did they come from? And just how in the world did we ever get such creatures as the birds-of-paradise? But such answers have not always been easy to come by, unless you happened to be an evolutionary biologist. That is, until John Reilly’s The Ascent of Birds: How Modern Science Is Revealing Their Story. You would be forgiven for prejudging a book dealing with “the evolution of modern birds from their origins in Gondwana, over 100 million years ago, to the present day” would be a slog to read. But nothing could be further from the truth. The key is the final word in this book’s subtitle: story. This isn’t a textbook, it’s the story of birds.
*The Birder's Library*

....we finally have a good volume presenting the vast amount of modern work done on bird evolution to those interested. This is a notable achievement and has been well executed.
*Tetrapod Zoology*

A readable overview of avian evolution.
*Birdbooker*

I highly recommend it to more experienced birders and to all interested in birds and avian evolution as an entertaining and instructive resource.
*Australian Field Ornithology*

...one of those publications that makes you realise how much you didn't know you didn't know. It is also tremendous fun to read, and would be a valuable addition to any keen birder's library.
*British Birds*

I don’t normally start reading a book and post a review before I’ve finished (or in the case of a few abandoned) reading it. I’m making an exception for this as it's not just an important contribution to ornithology it really is a shining example of how a technical subject can be presented in an easily digestible way to the lay readership. This is very well written and makes the evolutionary process in birds easy to understand and compelling. The author’s own passions get shared and you quickly go along for the ride and lap up the facts presented to you. This one’s a keeper!
*Fatbirder*

Every once in a while you stumble on a new natural history book that seems destined to be a classic. Is that a bold enough opening to convey how much I enjoyed The Ascent of Birds by John Reilly, new this spring from Pelagic Publishing?
*http://www.10000birds.com*

...this ranks among the best popular science books and provides a great guide to our current understanding of where, and how, birds evolved.
*BTO News*