19 Facts About James Greenway

James Cowan Greenway was an American ornithologist.

James Greenway is a grandson of George Lauder and a great-grandson of George Lauder, Sr.

James Greenway was educated at Phillips Exeter Academy, graduating in 1922, and graduated from Yale University in 1926 with a Bachelor of Arts degree.

James Greenway then worked for a few years as a reporter for the Brooklyn Eagle newspaper.

In 1929 Greenway became a partner in the Franco-Anglo-American Zoological Expedition to Madagascar.

James Greenway took part in the expedition from April to August 1929, after which he and Delacour left Madagascar for Delacour's fifth expedition to Indochina, where they collected zoological specimens in Tonkin and Annam.

At some point during his expedition to Annam, James Greenway was awarded the Order of the Dragon of Annam by the local authorities.

James Greenway, who broke from academia and research during his service in WWII, resumed his ornithological work at the MCZ.

James Greenway was active in the American Committee for International Wildlife Protection and later in the International Council for Bird Preservation.

In 1960 James Greenway left the MCZ for personal reasons, never to return there.

James Greenway began work on a list of the type specimens of birds held by the museum, a massive project not completed at the time of his death.

James Greenway instigated, part-financed and participated in a collecting expedition to New Caledonia in 1978, when he was 75 years old.

Jim James Greenway was so reluctant to leave tracks behind him that, after his death, even his sons did not know important details of their father's academic career.

Jim James Greenway was a profoundly eccentric man who was probably unable to tolerate others with a lesser streak of eccentricity than he had.

James Greenway should be remembered especially as the person who was in charge of the very rich MCZ bird collection for many years, who helped avian conservation get a solid start, who wrote the classic Extinct and Vanishing Birds of the World, who helped publish Peters' Check-list after Peters' death, and who assisted the Department of Ornithology at AMNH in many unrecorded but important ways.

James Greenway had kept a file detailing extinct and at risk birds for years prior to the publication of the book and over several years created a draft book of the book in 1954, but took another four years to create the final version.

James Greenway was commissioned in 1941, becoming a Lieutenant in 1943 and later a Lieutenant Commander, while serving on aircraft carriers in the South West Pacific, in the Solomon Islands and on New Caledonia.

In 2014, Alice James Greenway published a fictionalized account of James Greenway's World War II years, in the novel The Bird Skinner.

The novel was about "Jim Kennoway" who, like James Greenway, was stationed in the Solomon Islands, went on natural history expeditions to far-flung locations, and worked at the American Museum of Natural History.