A patch of grass was a patch of grass, and butterflies came in two colours, yellow and orange. This was life for three Bank of Bermuda HSBC employees before they were chosen for a special programme designed to bring together the corporate and scientific world.

Rose Stupfel, Susan Amos and Wendy McLeod said that after returning from a two-week HSBC Environmental Fellowship Programme with the Earthwatch Institute, they are seeing Bermuda wildlife in a whole new way.

Ms Stupfel who supports the bank?s corporate web banking platform, was sent to Vormsi Island, Estonia to take part in a wet grasslands survey.

?Before, I looked at a field as just a bunch of grass,? she said. ?Now, I see that there might be at least 20 or 30 species in that field. That is what I found so great about this whole project. There was so much knowledge that you gained.?

Ms Stupfel helped to map out about 110 hectares of land. With the data collected, scientists will determine how much diversity is in a managed area versus an unmanaged area. They will try to figure out how much management the area needs to sustain diversity. An area is ?managed? through activities such as cattle farming and grazing.

?This was all kinds of grass,? she said. ?When we did a survey, it would be a ten minute survey. During that time we might see twelve different species. In total, we did catalogue around 80 different species of birds.?

Next year, another team will go into the area mapped by Ms Stupfel and her teammates and do a quadrat survey. This involves laying out a small grid and then identifying everything within that grid.

?This project is very important,? said Ms Stupel. ?They want to come together with some really important research because they want to get funding.

?Cattle grazing is dying off in Estonia. Nobody wants to do it. So they have to subsidise some of this. Since the Russians left the country, nobody wants to do it. They use to have collective farming out there, but now everyone has left.

There is no one that is going to buy their products. They have to encourage land owners to bring cattle in and they have to pay them. The whole history of Estonia is take-overs. They have joined the European Union and want to get some funding from them.?

Mrs. Amos, business systems specialist in the treasury trading group at the bank and president of Keep Bermuda Beautiful (KBB), was sent to Kaikoura Peninsula, South Island, New Zealand to help study dusky dolphin society and behaviour. The aim of the project was to improve the management of fisheries and tourism in the area for the benefit of both dolphins and humans.

The two smallest types of dolphins, Hector?s dolphin and the dusky dolphin, live around New Zealand. ?Dolphins are the industry for that area,? said Mrs. Amos. ?Tour boats take people out to look at them. Planes and helicopters also fly over.?

The dolphins generally enjoy the interaction with humans. They voluntarily swim up to the boat and like to swim along in the bow wave, the interaction can have a negative impact. Mrs. Amos said they saw several ?duskies? with damaged dorsal fins, sometimes caused by a boat propeller blade.

?We were just studying the basic size of the groups,? she said. ?The intention was to tell which ones are coming back to that area.?

Mrs. Amos did not actually swim with the dolphins. All of her work was done from the deck of a boat. It was winter in New Zealand, and very cold.

Dolphin watching was strictly controlled. There were a limited number of boats that could watch a pod of dolphins at one time. Boats were not allowed to split up a pod, particularly a mother and calf. The dolphins even had their own lunch hour, when all the boats in the area left, and they could kick back and relax.

Wendy McLeod, bank information technology manager, was sent to the Deva Valley of the Picos de Europa in the Cantabrian Mountains of Spain to look at butterflies and orchids. This project explored the impact of land-use changes on the biodiversity of hay meadows, which provide an ideal habitat for a wide range of butterfly and orchid species.

Mrs. McLeod had to learn the ins and outs of ?spotting? butterflies. This literally involved putting a spot on them.

?We would go around to all these little fields and count how many of the species we saw,? she said. ?We would mark them with a special dot.?

She said it is easy to mark a butterfly ? once you know how.

?There is a whole international way of counting butterflies,? she said. ?It is quite cunning. You don?t just write 332 on their wing. It all depends on the position of the dots already on the butterfly.

?It was really cool. If we caught this certain species we would mark them with a colour dot system, note down the time, the day and the field we were in.

?They throw out these giant nets. Then you have to fish the butterflies out of the net, gently. It is scary, but if you know how to do it, it is quite easy. That was one of my biggest fears, harming one of these delicate little creatures. They were gorgeous.?

She said that this part of Spain is probably one of the most biodiverse places in Europe, because it is not intensively farmed.

?Once again farming is dying because the fields are very small,? she said. ?The young people don?t want to stay and farm a little plot of land.

?When the farms go back to scrub the biodiversity doesn?t actually do as well. One of the scientists said it is a complete myth that the world used to be covered in continuous forests. There were always clearings and glades. The butterflies, and many birds, prefer the field environment.?

She said that since she has been back in Bermuda, she has been paying more attention to the local butterfly population.

?Now I know more about the butterflies of Europe than I do about Bermuda,? she said. ?Of course, I had to rectify that when I came back.?

Mrs. McLeod said everyone on the study teams was very focused on the environment. Most of them were HSBC employees from branches all over the world.

In February 2002, HSBC launched the ?Investing in Nature? partnership with three charities: Botanic Gardens Conservation International (BGCI), the Earthwatch Institute and World Wildlife Fund (WWF). HSBC planned to donate $50 million over five years to this partnership in an effort to solve some pressing environmental problems. Since then, HSBC has sent more than 1,000 employees to join environmental expeditions.

The bank pays for all expenses, and the time does not come out of the employee?s vacation. Candidates must fill out an extensive application that is then sent to Earthwatch. HSBC has nothing to do with the selection process.

?The corporate labour makes a huge difference to the scientists,? said Mrs. McLeod. ?They get volunteers who are professional individuals who can follow the procedures and requests and who are comfortable working in a team. The volunteers help to collect long term data and goals. Earthwatch lets scientists map out their entire project. There is no politics involved. It is just fantastic.?

When participants return home they are each given $500 to donate to environmental projects of their own choice in their own country. They are also required to talk about their experiences with other bank employees. The group has already given a presentation at the bank and are planning a second one.

?You don?t have to start your own project,? said Ms Stupfel. ?You can donate your money to an existing one. I am interested in an environmental project called Reef Environmental Education Foundation (REEF). They are doing something very similar to what we were doing in the grasslands study. They are looking at trends in fish and other species.?

?What I noticed was that I became much more aware,? said Ms Stupfel. ?I went snorkelling the other day. I was out in Paradise Lake. It appeared that there was a lot of dead coral there. I swam around and didn?t see any fish at all.

?Then I saw some live coral with tons of fish around it. It is the same thing when you have this diversity, the fish are feeding off the coral. If you have dying coral then you will have a dying fish population. Now I have this passion now to identify things. I think it is the education you get through experience that really ties it altogether.?