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[PsychicKid]

Simple question. I got a handful of turkeys milling about and I'd like to actually hatch their eggs so I have a turkeysplosion, but my Dorfs immediatly took their eggs the second they were laid. How do I keep the Dorfs from taking them so I can hatch them? Just forbid eggs from my food piles?

[SixOfSpades]

Build a wall around their pasture (or similarly isolate them from would-be egg collectors), and include a door that can be locked/unlocked as you wish to install more nest boxes.

[PsychicKid]

Hmmm I suppose I could do that. My nest boxes are kinda just out in the open with the rest of my food production room. A big square room with four farm plots for booze, a big stockpile for all foods except booze and prepared meals, relavent workshops, and then my nestboxes against the wall. But, that's an easy fix. Thanks.

[kilakan]

if you are watching while they lay eggs you can also forbid the eggs and dwarves won't harvest them.

[Chthonic]

I'm not sure whether this works or not, but you might be able to set your food stockpile options to exclude eggs.

[Oaktree]

I usually build some 1x1 rooms off my kitchen area and put the nest boxes there.  And generally construct them so that one door can block access to two boxes.

Declare the room a 1x1 pasture and assign a hen there.  That lets me define most of my kitchen and food storage area as a separate pasture to put cats in for vermin control.

[Drazinononda]

I disable eggs from my food stockpiles and turn off egg cooking in the Kitchen screen. Minimizes the amount of micromanagement I have to do, because since there's nothing to do with the eggs anyway, the dwarves leave them alone and I don't have to forbid them all the time.

On the other hand, if your birds get chased or taken away from the nest boxes for any reason, you have to micromanage to make sure only the abandoned eggs get used. Still, less trouble than micromanaging all the eggs, all the time.

[Starver]

Already said, but I tend to just disable eggs as cookable (as soon as any type of egg appears, which might mean that a given rare breed might lose the very first clutch to the cooks, before you can make that distinction), as well as making eggs one of the very few things that I exclude from food stockpiles (which can be done for all varieties, right from the get-go).

At least until I have various avian breeds to excess, then I may enable such things to take full advantage of my enlarged population.  Although often I still want to ignore eggs as a food-source and instead just butcher the least favourable birds in a move that is part eugenics and part delayed-gratification-meat-production.

The standard answer always seems to be lock them in, but I find that no advantage.  (I tend to like plucking young birds from the pasture and get them seconded out to "guard pastures", where they act as lookouts.  Always handy to be able to move the brids around and put them in these (and then lock the doors I installed around the guard pastures, so that they don't get scared off-station by one sneaking enemy, and potentially let another sneaking enemy through while someone mobilises to put them back, or get equally scared trying...  But that's just the way I work well, YMMV.)

[Particleman]

The way I do it is to make a general poultry pasture with a bunch of nest boxes, preferably situated near my food stockpiles.

I build a couple small rooms behind the pasture and stick a nest box or two in there, and when I want some more of a given species I set a pasture there and assign a couple birds to it, then lock the doors once they're in there, and add them and their new offspring back to the main poultry pasture once they've hatched.

[Sutremaine]

Note for the future: if you capture and tame egglayers, you'll need to lock them in or stop them from having their training refreshed.

[magmablob]

the door option is the best one in my opinion yuou dont have to forbidd them for cooking or excluding them from food stcopiles or forbid them but if you dont wanna build a wall sorrounding your pasture you can always break on a cave and start growing cave moss its easier having the pasture indoors, thats what i usually do first in all my forts anyway so my animals can pasture inside

[musicmastermsh]

aaaaaaand now I've got more Stray Giant Eagle (Tame) than I know what to do with.  Fantastic egg and meat and animal parts source, not that eggs and meat and animal parts were ever in short supply.

[Starver]

the door option is the best one in my opinion yuou dont have to forbidd them for cooking or excluding them from food stcopiles or forbid them but if you dont wanna build a wall sorrounding your pasture you can always break on a cave and start growing cave moss its easier having the pasture indoors, thats what i usually do first in all my forts anyway so my animals can pasture inside

Most of my pastures are subterranean, that quickly (before I overload with grazers) get whatever the early-cave stuff, but for non-grazers do pastures need to be on a currently growth-supporting surface?

Quick, Robin!  To the BatPreCaveBreachingTestingEmbarkComputerChairs!!!

[Oaktree]

Non-grazer pastures can essentially be anywhere.  One reason I prefer working with birds and other non-grazers for meat purposes is that they can be pastured on stone levels without any special additional considerations.