Limited Sight At 81 Doesn’t Keep Ornithologist Tethered To His Treadmill

By Jerilyn Lemont
The first thing Wesley “Bud” Lanyon, Ph.D., did when he moved into Broad Reach Healthcare’s Victorian Assisted Living Residence in North Chatham was to ask about available space if he were to purchase a treadmill. There was and he did and he now spends an hour, twice a day, on his machine.

Dr. Lanyon, 81, is legally blind, but that doesn’t mean all his exercising is stationary. He still enjoys hiking at Cape Cod National Seashore with friends and propelling his single-person canoe (alongside a companion) in the lake near his summer home in upstate New York.

Dr. Lanyon is a retired curator of birds at the Museum of Natural History in New York City and has recently lectured locally, entertaining area birdwatchers.

Dr. Lanyon and his late wife, Vickie, spent the warmer months at their summer cabin and then enjoyed what he describes as a “vagabond lifestyle” driving their camper throughout the southern United States.

But in 2004 Mrs. Lanyon died of cancer and Dr. Lanyon lost much of his vision to macular degeneration.

No longer able to drive, he decided to settle on the Cape to be near his grandchildren and daughter, who works for the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Summers are still spent in the cabin overlooking the cliffs where the first breeding pair of peregrine falcons nested when they began to reestablish themselves in this country.

Assisted by an elaborate computer system with programs that allow him to blow things up into a font size he can read, Dr. Lanyon also keeps his mind as well as his body fit.

His first book was Confessions of an Octogenaria –An Autobiography of a Professor, and he’s nowhard at work on another. It’s about birds, specifically flycatchers, or “Genus Myarcus” and also details his 30-plus years of study and travels to South America.
(Ms. Lemont is Associate Executive Director of Bread Reach Healthcare, 508-945-4611.)