Emily Peyton passed away quietly in her sleep on October 15, ending a brave, 5-year ordeal with stage-four cancer.
As Emily’s companion and husband for 25 years, the obituary here will run personal, with a focus not just on Emily’s considerable accomplishments, but also on her quiet but indominable character, and her deep attachment with the natural world around her. I believe this perspective will ring true with the many Linnaean members who knew her, from the park and elsewhere, many of whom have expressed deeply appreciated remembrances.
Emily was born in Richmond, Virginia, spent her high school years in Rocky Mount, NC, and attended University of North Carolina (math major), later Stern School in NYC for a masters. She worked for 45 years in technical sales with IBM, before retiring in 2018.
Emily and I met on a Linnaean trip to Brigantine I was leading (on April 8, 1995, to be perfectly exact). By then I was in full transition to butterfly study, working on East Coast book photos. As our orbits began to synchronize, Emily continued to bird actively, while I jaunted off on one photo trip or another. Eventually she would scold me on missing a birding field mark I’d formerly known, but which had slipped away from disuse. She really was good in the field.
As “book work” intensified, Emily became my co-traveling field manager, invaluably helping me relocate subjects that had spooked and flown off, and (importantly) retrieving exposed film cartridges that had slipped from my pocket. But all the while she was quietly studying, and once the book was done, I gave her an old Nikon body, along with a flash and macro lens. She quickly became a proficient field photographer, with a specialty on capturing butterflies in flight that significantly surpassed my own abilities. She never wanted to show her shots in a separate presentation – she was happy just to take them and enjoy what she was seeing. (I have a memorial deck of her photos, presented to NYC Butterfly Club, for any interested.)
We traveled widely in our time together, to visit nature and photograph butterflies – Peru, Ecuador, Brazil, Argentina, Panama, Belize, Mexico, Jamaica, Hungary, South Africa, multiple US/Canadian locations. Photographing 350 some-odd butterfly species at Cristalino in Brazil, in just over a week, was perhaps the epitome of our life together.
Many of us will miss her, and may she rest in peace.
– Rick Cech