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Burrumbuttock Primary School, near Albury in NSW, knew they had a rabbit problem, when opening the gates to the school in the morning one or two bunnies popped up out of the precious school vegetable garden!Principal Owen Dunlop with the teachers and students consulted each other in their wonderful Landcare Education Centre and thought about what to do.

They got a call soon after from the RabbitScan team looking for a school to trial the new RabbitScan project. All the Team needed was a school who knew they had a few rabbits around and were keen to find out just how many they had and what kind of damage those rabbits were doing. The School jumped at the chance.

On one day some students did some thinking in class with each other and the teachers, then planned how to look in their local area for rabbits, beyond their school fences and the school's lovely garden. Together they planned an excursion, going through the usual steps, finding a suitable site, doing a risk assessment, getting the permissions and day planned and approved. Then the kids and teachers went to the site and started looking for rabbits. They didn't have far to go to find them. Rabbits created homes under fallen trees, some pock-marked the landscape with warrens, which everyone had to be careful not to fall into. Kids took digital photos of the damage and the evidence. Then they took all this data back to the classroom. With a little calculation, and the help of the great cartoon showing that a pair of breeding rabbits can breed up to 184 rabbits in just 18 months...and a math lesson later, and the kids were shocked to discover just how many rabbits would be plaguing them before they reached highschool!

They didn't stop there though. Stories were written, interviews with locals were captured and a local bloke who had ferrets visited to show what the old ways of rabbit hunting entailed. One of the students described this day as his best ever day at school, ever! Lots of learning, in an interactive, dynamic way led to results that really inspired the students to find out more and more and to help the community plan to control rabbits into the future. Some of the pictures the kids took on the day are on this site. Teachers and Students alike found the lessons and the experience well rounded and able to connect into so many curriculum areas. The kids are keen to see what other scats and dung they have found can tell them about what other species are active in their local area. So much to find and learn from a pile of old rabbit dung!