## 3 Results
### Experiment 2  
When presented with the grass, the pregnant does immediately started to explore by sniffing both bunches of the unknown grass material. They spent a lot of time hopping in and out of the nest box which behaviour was frequently preceded by digging movements. After a few minutes they started collecting the grass by picking out a few dozen leaves and bringing into the nest box. The females spent more time collecting dry than green grass (Figure 1), which is a significant difference by [PERSON] matched-pairs signed-ranks test (W = 26, N = 7, \(p\) < 0.05) showing that there is a preference even in the domestic rabbits for collecting dry grass. On the contrary, the animals spent much more time eating the green rather than the dry grass ([PERSON] test: W = 21, N = 7, \(p\) < 0.05). Additionally, the animals spent 31% of the test time within the nest box where we sometimes could see them arranging and eating the grass. Although because of the dim light we could not determine which grass type was eaten, analysis of the nest composition after the test suggested there could be a differential grazing inside the nest too. The dry grass content of freshly made nests by primiparous domestic females was 85%, significantly different from chance by [PERSON] exact test (X\({}^{2}\) = 12.1, \(p\) < 0.01), and significantly higher ([PERSON] matched-pairs signed-ranks test W = 24, N = 7, \(p\) < 0.05) than the 75% ratio of collection directed to the dry tussock.  
\begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c} \hline \hline \multicolumn{2}{c}{**Percent Volume (Standard Error)**} \\ \hline Fur & 43 (12.2) \\ Plant material & 55 (14.7) \\ Other (eg. sand, litter) & 2 (3.8) \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table}
Table 1: Basic elements of the wild rabbit nests (N = 21) from Bugac Juniper Forest, Hungary.  
\begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c} \hline \hline \multicolumn{2}{c}{**Percent Plant Material (Standard Error)**} \\ \hline Dry & \\ \hline _Agropyron_ & 15.3 \\ _Calamagrostis_ & 67.3 \\ _Carex_ & 13.3 \\ Other & 3.5 \\ \hline Total dry & 84.4 (14.5) \\ \hline \multicolumn{2}{c}{Green} \\ \hline _Colchicine_ & 2.5 \\ _Hypnum c._ & 7.4 \\ _Polygonatum o._ & 3.2 \\ Other & 2.5 \\ \hline Total green & 15.6 (14.5) \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table}
Table 2: The composition of the wild rabbit nests.  
The effect of ageing on the estimate of grass dryness was tested by repeatedly analysing the composition of stored nests for four weeks (Figure 2). Although the original ratio of 85% had been gradually increased to 91% by the end of the 4 th week, only the change between the first and the last two weeks was significant by the Dunn test (alpha = 0.05) following Friedman nonparametric ANOVA for repeated measures (Fr = 18.38, N = 7, \(p<0.01\)).  
Figure 1: The percentage of time spent collecting or eating from either the green or dry grass by naive primiparous domestic rabbit females (N = 7) during the one-hour observation period. Asterisks indicate significant differences (\(p<0.05\)) in Wilcoxon matched-pairs signed-ranks tests.  
Figure 2: The effect of ageing on the dry matter ratio of nests (N = 7) made by females in Experiment 2. The value for each nest is an average from microscopic observation of 10 subsamples per nest. Different letters above the columns indicate significant differences in post hoc Dunn test (alpha = 0.05) following Friedman nonparametric ANOVA for repeated measures.