[1] For his elementary education, he attended the Motley School in Minneapolis, where he served as a "policeman" as a ten-year old, shepherding the younger students across the street at a dangerous intersection.
While at university he met his future wife, Olive Lowen, and the two were married on June 19, 1930, shortly after he completed his doctorate.
[1] In 1935, Zeleny accepted a position as a biochemist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the couple moved to the Washington, D.C., area,[3] settling in University Park, Maryland.
Even before entering high school in the late 1910s, Zeleny was building bluebird nesting boxes, utilizing a design put out by the Department of Agriculture.
[11][9] Zeleny's concern can be summed up in a letter he wrote to the editor of The Capitol newspaper, in Arlington, Maryland: The eastern bluebird, one of our finest and most useful songbirds, is in deep trouble almost everywhere.
... the bluebirds are unable to compete with the starlings and house sparrows that were originally brought into the United States from Europe and have now overrun the country in huge numbers.
The only practical solution to this problem is to supply the blue-birds with large numbers of starling-proof nesting houses ...[12]By the early 1970s Zeleny was considered to be one of the country's leading experts on bluebirds.
[16][17] That same year National Geographic credited Zeleny with being the major reason for the turn-around of the bluebird species, which had been on the verge of extinction.
[21] Today, he is still credited with the rebound of the North American bluebird population, as well as being the founding father of the "nest box movement".