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[NW_Kohaku]

I like to make a two-tile pasture for the female bird breeders with one tile being the nest box.  The nest box tile is outside all burrows.  The other tile is so that the female can be returned to the pasture if she ever starts to stray.

Also, eggs count as meat, so again, you can feed a whole carnivore fortress on like 6 turkeys and 2 other birds just for the variety, it's not hard.

[k9wazere]

It's not that hard.  You just put each individual animal on their own 1x1 pasture so they don't go wandering through your fort.  Pasture a male next to a female so they can breed.  For birds, you want the female pasture on top of a nest box so she can lay the eggs.  When the females lay the eggs, you go in and forbid the eggs so they stay in the nest and hatch or else your dorfs will carry the eggs off to a food stockpile or kitchen.  If you're running DFHack, it's got a plugin that tells you if a clutch of eggs is fertile or not, so you can just forbid one or two clutches and let the dwarves collect the rest, and you only really need to hatch a clutch of eggs once or twice a year to maintain your bird population.

Grazers are harder to raise because they need grass which either means keeping them on the surface somewhere which is dangerous, or digging out a soil layer underground. 

You can also let your cats breed and butcher what you don't want.  Generally, I keep cats pastured over food stockpiles to control vermin.  I keep a pair of male and female cats over my main food and booze stockpiles so they'll breed and a single cat over other food related stockpiles like the harvest stockpile, seed stockpile and so on.  As the cats pop out kittens, I just butcher the oldest cats to keep the population from getting out of hand.  Cat's can't wander when they're pastured, so they stay where they're needed to kill vermin, and they're less likely to adopt cat dorfs too.

Out of curiosity, when did animals stop breeding by telepathy from anywhere on the map? I might be mis-remembering but I thought it was previously the case that any two animals on the map could breed regardless of location.

[Bumber]

Out of curiosity, when did animals stop breeding by telepathy from anywhere on the map? I might be mis-remembering but I thought it was previously the case that any two animals on the map could breed regardless of location.

0.40.19

[k9wazere]

0.40.19

Muchly thanks

[HungThir]

i haven't specifically tried sustaining a fortress from hunting only, but i've found that playing on a 1x1 embark with active hunters produces a tonne of leather (new wandering animals seem to spawn in as soon as the last lot are killed, which doesn't take long on such a small map), and presumably a tonne of meat too

[PatrikLundell]

Yes, when the last critter group is gone (left, killed, or trapped) a new one spawns. However, the number of critters in each species is limited, and you also get bird groups that fly too high to be targeted. To make things worse, sometimes bird groups that have gotten some members trapped get stuck, flying in place at a high altitude, blocking further spawning (until you either build towers from which to hunt them, or a flying Titan arrives and decides to kill them before attacking the fortress).