Y. ALEKSIEV
Institute of Mountain Stockbreeding and Agriculture, BG - 5600 Troyan, Bulgaria
ALEKSIEV, Y., 2008. A note on the timing of birth in Bulgarian White dairy goat. Bulg. J. Agric. Sci., 14: 476-479
The parturition timing pattern was investigated for a total of 153 does during two consecutive years. During the kidding time in February goats were monitored at an hourly interval throughout 24 hours of the day. Hourly frequencies of spontaneous live births showed a unimodal distribution with maximum kidding between 10:00 and 20:00 h (78.5% of the total). The peak of delivery was between 14:00 and 16:00 h (21.6% of the total birth), whereas the lowest incidences of kidding were observed between 04:00 and 06:00 h in the morning (0.7% of the total birth). There was not any detectable effect of the time of feeding on birth distribution. Frequency of kidding began to increase soon after the morning feeding and decreased sharply after the afternoon feeding. The results suggest that temporal distribution of births corresponding to circadian rhythm and that kidding was concentrated mainly during the daytime hours.