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He was born on July 28, 1840 in Sinclairville, Chautauqua County, New York, United States, the only child of Mary (Burritt) and Pardon Sennett, a prosperous blast-furnace operator. His interest in ornithology apparently did not reveal itself until he was fully grown and well established in business.
He graduated from Erie Academy, intending to enter Yale, but his eyesight was such that he had to abandon further academic study and he spent the next four years in Europe.
In 1865 he began his industrial career as a manufacturer of oil-well machinery at Meadville; nearly thirty years later he moved his large works to Youngstown, Ohio. He served two terms, 1877-81, as mayor of Meadville and did much to make it a sanitary, well-planned city.
He did his ornithological work wholly in his spare time. Although he made extensive collections in western Minnesota, where he went in the spring of 1876 on his first ornithological expedition, he never published his results. His most prolonged and important studies dealt with the bird life of the lower Rio Grande region of southern Texas, then virtually a new field for the naturalist. In 1877, having arranged his business affairs so as to have more leisure time, he made a stay of two months along the Rio Grande; in 1878 he made a second trip there, covering a slightly longer period, and in 1882 a third.
He published the results of only the first two Texas trips. Although he never went there again, he kept up his interest in the region and dispatched collectors there to gather material for him. It was his intention to study each season's work and publish the results as soon as possible, but his business interests encroached more and more on his time and interfered with his scientific work.
His proposed monographic work on the avifauna of the lower Rio Grande he did not live to write; the materials he had gathered over a period of many years, however, were utilized by others.
In 1883 he deposited his splendid collections of birds and mammals in the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where he often worked during the winters from 1883 to 1896.
He died in 1900.
George Burritt Sennett published twenty-nine scientific papers on ornithology, the most important of them are "Notes on the Ornithology of the Lower Rio Grande, Texas, from Observations Made During the Season 1877", "Further Notes on the Ornithology of the Lower Rio Grande of Texas from Observations made During the Spring of 1878", and "Descriptions of a New Species and Two New Subspecies of Birds from Texas". He described ten forms of birds new to science, and four birds were named in his honor.
He married Sarah Essex, by whom he had a daughter.
