Ábrahám Levente (szerk.): Válogatott tanulmányok V. - Natura Somogyiensis 17. (Kaposvár, 2010)
LANSZKI, J., SÁRDI, B., & L. SZÉLES, G.: Egy kézből nevelt nyest (Martes foina) táplálék-összetétele az elengedést és önállóvá válást követően egy hazai faluban
310 NATURA SOMOGYIENSIS summer (which is the mating season of stone martens), when it reached full size, it spent increasingly long periods of time out of our sight; then occasionally it went away from home for the night. Eventually, it did not return for food, but we still recognized its presence afterwards. It chose the attic of our house as the place for its nest and deposited its scat at typical places in our yard. The goal of this study was to analyze the diet composition of this hand-reared stone marten after release. Material and methods The study was performed in Fonó (village in Somogy county, Hungary). Samples (n=34 individual scats) were collected from the pavement by the house, from the rock garden and in the attic of the house between September 2005 and February 2006. The diet composition of the released stone marten was investigated by analysis of scats, using standard wet procedure. Prey determination was performed by microscope on the basis of feather, bone, dentition and hair characteristics. Protocols for food determination from scats have been described in detail elsewhere (e.g. JEDRZEJEWSKA and JEDRZEJEWSKI 1998, LANSZKI 2003). For expressing diet composition, two measures were used: the relative frequency of occurrence (%0, number of occurrences of a certain food type divided by total number of occurrences of all food types) and percentage of biomass consumed (%B). To estimate the fresh mass of food ingested (REYNOLDS and AEBISCHER 1991), all dry food remains were weighed separately and the mass data were multiplied by an appropriate conversion factor, as summarised by JEDRZEJEWSKA and JEDRZEJEWSKI (1998) for the marten. Trophic niche breadth was calculated in accordance with Levins (1968 in Krebs 1989): B = 1/Spj 2, where p; = the percentage relative frequency, or percentage biomass consumed of the i t h taxon; and standardized across food taxa: B A =(B-l)/(n-l), rating from 0 (specialized food habits) to 1 (generalist food habits). The following four or five main food taxa (types) were used in the calculations related to trophic niche for the purpose of comparing it to the earlier analysis from here (Fonó, village): 1 - small mammals, 2 - domestic animals and household food (plain cooking and pet food), 3 - birds, 4 - invertebrates (arthropods and molluscs) and alternatively 5 - plants. Classification of prey species on the basis of their weight and habitat association have been detailed e.g. in LANSZKI et al. (2009). SPSS 10.0 (1999) statistics program was used for processing data. Results and discussion The 34 scat samples of the hand-reared stone marten contained 8 different animal and 8 plant food taxa. Easily available plant material - especially fruits - formed the dominant component of the diet in the autumn-winter period studied (O: 56.9% and B: 56.6%, Table 1), similar to reports in other studies (e.g. HOLISOVÁ and OBRTEL 1982, TESTER 1986, LODÉ 1994, GENOVESI et al. 1996, PRIGIONI et al. 2008) and in the earlier village study (LANSZKI 2003). Main fruits eaten were grape, apple and blackthorn, but the marten consumed seeds and probably also fed from garbage (e.g. cherry). The hand-reared stone marten was fed wet and dry catfood and various seasonally available garden fruits.
