Thanks for all the help. I decided to embark in a Terrifying temperate woodland. I am currently building a roof over my outside portion of my fortress. Skeletal buzzards are really annoying. I also get skeletal Alligators. But I can't put their corpses into a refuse pile.
Its Autumn of the first year in my Terrifying embark. The 'deceased' screen is about three pages long of skeletal groundhogs, black crows, buzzards, and giraffes (which ambushed and killed my brewer/cook, my one casualty). I had to carve a moat next to the brook and just finished building a roofed pillbox in the center, just large enough to fit stairs and a depot. The waves of skeletons came so frequently that by the time I was done wrestling one group of critters into submission, the next group would appear at the edge of the map. Before I finished the roof, the only work I could get done was in between waves until the next wave of critters 'discovered' us. The fort interior is packed with bird bone refuse, which I'm converting to armor (bone carver in my first migrant wave!) to prepare for the possibility of rescuing my first caravan from those bastard giraffes. We nearly starved from being so behind on farming (all underground), but with the roof finished I think we're out of the woods now.
PotatoM, be careful with enabling outdoor refuse hauling, if you have any cats it will send dwarves scurrying after lizard remains in the damnedest places and make them easy prey for the larger skeletal stuff. I forget the setting, but what I do is auto-forbid all corpses on death, and then manually unforbid the ones (d-b-c for mass-reclaim) that I want them to haul. (Auto-forbid corpses is a great way to manage civvies from running into combat to drag away buddies or refuse; but it can lead to dwarves rotting if you forget to reclaim them).
Thanks a lot. It has been a while since I last played DF. Maybe I will upload my fort or something for anyone who wants to see how it's going.