Montague Chamberlain was born on April 5, 1844, in St. John, New Brunswick.

He was a Canadian-American businessman, naturalist, and ethnographer. He spent the first few decades of his life as a bookkeeper and later manager of a grocery company in St. John. In his mid-twenties, he also became a dedicated amateur ornithologist. He was a Vice-President of the New Brunswick Natural History Society. In 1883, he co-founded the American Ornithologists' Union. In 1888, Chamberlain became a resident member and editor for the Nuttall Ornithological Club in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a founding member of the American Ornithologists' Union. After quitting the grocery business, he became the assistant secretary of the Harvard Corporation in 1889 and the secretary of the Lawrence Scientific School in 1893. He was a frequent contributor to The Bulletin of the Nuttall Ornithological Club, The Auk (of which he was also a founding associate editor), and Bulletin of the Natural History Society of New Brunswick. He also authored several books, e.g., "A Catalogue of Canadian Birds" (1887), "Birds of Greenland" (1889), and "The Penobscot Indians" (1899).

In 1907, he married Anna Sartoris Prout (1868–1913). He died on February 10, 1924, in Boston, Massachusetts.