James Greenway

James Cowan Greenway (April 7, 1903 – June 10, 1989) was an American ornithologist. An eccentric, shy, and often reclusive man, his survey of extinct and vanishing birds provided the base for much subsequent work on bird conservation.

Early years Greenway was born in New York City, though grew up on the Lauder Greenway Estate in Greenwich, Connecticut, with his brothers G. Lauder Greenway and Gilbert Greenway, as the son of James Greenway Sr., founder of the Yale School of Public Health. He is also a grandson of George Lauder and a great-grandson of George Lauder, Sr. He was educated at Phillips Exeter Academy, graduating in 1922, and graduated from Yale University in 1926 with a Bachelor of Arts degree. He then worked for a few years as a reporter for the Brooklyn Eagle newspaper.

Expeditions and research

Expeditions with Delacour In 1929 Greenway became a partner in the Franco-Anglo-American Zoological Expedition to Madagascar. The expedition was sponsored by the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle in Paris, the British Natural History Museum in London, and the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York City, and led by French ornithologist Jean Delacour. 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.

Museum of Comparative Zoology In 1932 Greenway joined the Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ) at Harvard University as Assistant Curator of Birds until 1952 and then, succeeding James Lee Peters, as Curator until 1960. During the 1930s he participated in several collecting expeditions to the Caribbean, especially the Bahamas. In 1936, he and his brother Gilbert flew across the Bahamas from north to south, and were the first to land a plane on East Caicos in the Turks and Caicos Islands; the school children were let out of school for the special occasion. which had a second edition published in 1967. 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. This book was one of three published by the American Committee for International Wildlife Protection which were the precursors to the IUCN Red List which details species at risk of extinction; along with Francis Harper's Extinct and Vanishing Mammals of the Old World and Glover Morrill Allen's Extinct and Vanishing Mammals of the Western Hemisphere. Today these books are seen as the inspiration behind the IUCN Red List. In 1967 Donn Rosen named a fish, Scolichthys greenwayi, after him.

Military service During the Second World War Greenway served in the United States Navy. He 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. Within months after his mother's death, Greenway divorced his first wife and ran off to New York with his mistress, Mary Frances Oakes Hunnewell (died April 22, 1989), who herself also had to divorce her spouse in order to marry Greenway.

The Bird Skinner In 2014, Alice Greenway (a granddaughter from Greenway's first marriage) published a fictionalized account of Greenway's World War II years, in the novel The Bird Skinner (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press). The novel was about "Jim Kennoway" who, like 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. The one key difference is that in the novel, the fictional "Kennoway" mourned "the death of his beautiful wife," who died young. The real Greenway, in contrast, divorced his first wife in order to marry his mistress. The fact that The Bird Skinner is a semi-fictionalized account of the author's grandfather's life — with a sanitized version of his marital life — gives readers a much better appreciation of the book and the author's motivations.