Chesterfield

About the Program
Bayer’s Chesterfield campus is just outside St. Louis, Missouri, in a suburban area with rural qualities. Employees there have been active for wildlife management for over two decades, surviving changes in corporate ownership and new development. While conservation professionals are consulted for technical advice, the program is completely organized and managed by Bayer employees, who engage many of their co-workers in implementation and monitoring.

Practices and Impacts

• The Chesterfield campus includes several grasslands, totaling about seven acres, that have been restored over a 26-year period. The team enhances plant diversity by gathering seed in one area and scattering it in another. Monitoring involves recording plant inventories and supplementary observations of pollinators.
• The grassland areas, as well as some landscaped rain gardens, include native plants that provide optimal habitat for many pollinators. While the team records observations of the variety of moths and butterflies found, they focus on monarch butterflies. The team added milkweed in several parts of the grasslands and have been excited to find monarch caterpillars and cocoons.
• The nest box project began in 2010 and the team now maintains 15 nest boxes, which were built with assistance of local scouts, and trains 10-15 volunteers each year to collect weekly data on the boxes. Besides training on identifying species by their nests and eggs, volunteers are provided with an app for uploading data and photos. Native cavity-nesting birds using the boxes include eastern bluebirds, Carolina chickadees and house wrens, as well as the non-native English sparrow. When the team found that house wrens destroyed bluebird eggs to take over certain nest boxes, they installed a deterrent that does not harm the native wrens.
• For the annual Earth Day Celebration, the team invites about 15 organizations to sponsor booths in a central location on campus. Throughout the Earth Day Week, the planning team created activities for employees and their families to experience off-site due to the Bayer campus being closed to visitors. 
• The project team developed a bat box project by installing two boxes to support native Missouri bat species. Monitoring indicates there has not yet been any bats utilizing the houses.
•  A wood duck project was started in 2021 with the installation of three nest boxes. Monitoring was limited during this time frame and no nesting wood ducks were observed.