Jitka Bartošová

1 Introduction The majority of mammals inhabit seasonal environments and regulate their reproductive cycles, including the timing of parturition, to ensure that offspring are reared under the most favorable ecological conditions throughout the year (Bronson and Heideman 1994). Timing of parturition largely determines the temporal clustering of births (reviewed by Ims 1990), which in turn can affect growth (e.g., in the roe deer Capreolus capreolus; Plard et al.

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All articles published by MDPI are made immediately available worldwide under an open access license. No special permission is required to reuse all or part of the article published by MDPI, including figures and tables. For articles published under an open access Creative Common CC BY license, any part of the article may be reused without permission provided that the original article is clearly cited. For more information, please refer to https://www.mdpi.com/openaccess.