The Junior Scientist Programme is run through our school owl education initiative. Each learner receives a face mask (granted, everyone has one of these nowadays!), a pair of surgical gloves, a petri dish, tweezers and the skeleton key. Learners dissect owl pellets and identify the bones to record which rodent species they find using a rodent skeleton key. The data is submitted to our National Owl Diet Database. The pellets dissection kits are all labelled with the coordinates from where the pellets were collected. We give this information back to the farmers for them to help manage their rodent problems more effectively.
The children really enjoy it and it's great to have so many South African school children involved in a science project that provides us with such useful data.