Joel Greenberg is a research associate of both the Chicago Academy of Sciences Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum and the Field Museum. He has taught courses on natural history for the Morton Arboretum, Brookfield Zoo, and Chicago Botanical Garden, and is the author of Of Prairie, Woods, and Waters: Two Centuries of Chicago Nature Writing; A Natural History of the Chicago Region; and A Birder’s Guide to the Chicago Region (with Lynne Carpenter). His articles or reviews have been published in Science, Birder’s World, and Environmental History, and he is a featured blogger on the website Birdzilla. com. He cohosted a radio show on the outdoors on WKCC. A retired member of the Illinois Bar, Greenberg has received the Protector of the Environment Award (1997, Chicago Audubon Society) and Environmental Leadership Award (2004, Institute for Environmental Science and Policy, University of Illinois at Chicago).
Beyond writing A Feathered River Across the Sky, Greenberg is working with David Mrazek on creating a documentary on passenger pigeons and extinction called From Billions to None: The Passenger Pigeon’s Flight to Extinction. These projects are all major elements of Project Passenger Pigeon, an international effort which Greenberg helped bring about.
An avid birder since the age of twelve, Greenberg, his wife, and their stuffed passenger pigeon, Heinrich, reside in the Chicago area.