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[joeclark77]

I'm in an untimed wilds map that has a lot of visits from giant birds and bird-men, and I got thinking I'd like to have some of them nesting in my kitchen for exotic egg roasts.  Unfortunately my strategy of building bridges across the river and covering them with cage traps (which works fantastically for catching land animals) wasn't going to work very well at catching these birds alive.

So I remembered Sphalerite's famous forum thread on catching sea monsters and how he discovered that the best way was to place cage traps along the shore.  It works because of monster pathfinding, particularly if you have a convex corner, like so:

Code: [Select]

.........C.........
.........#.........
........###........
.......#####.......
A....D#######E....B
Imagine a beast traveling from point A to point B.  You don't have to know the internals of the game's pathfinding mechanism to know that the shortest path around the obstacle is going to involve moving "east" and "northeast" and "southeast".  The path may not go through D (you could go "northeast" first before going east) or E, but every shortest path will pass through point C, so a cage trap there will be your best bet for a capture.

Well, I figured that the same principle would hold in 3D, where the "#" symbols in the diagram represent a vertical slice of a hill or mountain on your map.  I happen to have a rather tall volcano and I figured a lot of birds would path over the heights. (Point C isn't necessarily the peak, just the peak of whatever "slice" of the volcano is between points A and B.)

So I placed cage traps all around the top level of my volcano (top 2 levels, actually, but the peak is only a single tile).  So far I've trapped a family of giant wrens (domesticated them for eggs), giant magpies (fried in a longland flour batter with a special blend of 11 herbs and quarry bush leaves), a giant tiercel peregrine, and a giant insect or two.  I want to get some giant peach-faced lovebirds and see how they cook.
 
Anybody else have experience trapping bird life?  Are there other effective ways of doing it?

[Eric Blank]

I haven't personally any experience in the field of bird catching, But I'd wager that even a 2-level wall with a triangular cross section, similar to your diagram, will work the same as a natural mountain for these purposes. I have also noted that when one of my old forts had access to both the surface and an underground cavern I would catch peregrine falcon people in my cage traps, as they apparently had tried to actually enter the fortress, and my entry hallway was roofed over and trapped.

[Orange Wizard]

... you have to permanently deafen someone.

Or, rather, you can't make an omelette without permanently deafening someone.

[wierd]

This is a common mistake. It's actually the eyeballs. You can't make a good omlette without fried eyeballs to fold in. The best come from eagle eyed marksdwarves, and from seige operators.

True story.

[Loud Whispers]

You can't make an omelet without breaking a few spines... I'm not a very good cook.

A very entertaining way is to build towers with fortifications and cells everywhere. 1zlvl below the fortifications lay out floors and traps.
Place a Giant Cave Spider in the cell.
Works nicely for savage and evil birds.