I guessed that was the reason why they didn't work. I've never encountered no wind before on any of my previous embarks so I was a bit puzzled.
I noticed that nature really, really hates me (-39,000 at one point). Could it be because I caged so many creatures? Had a gnome die?
Related to this, when I went to release some creatures into the wild to help my rating, I assigned them to a pasture on the Nature Shrine. After the gnome released them, another gnome came along and put the animal back on the pasture again, despite it being a wild animal at this point.
This isn't the worst part.
When I tried to unassigned the creatures to the pasture while the gnome was leading it there, the gnome started spamming "cant do X, handing dangerous creature.". I had to make some cages for them to put the wild animals in for them to stop spamming error messages, then build the cages, connect to a lever and release them that way. This only happened if the gnome hadn't put the animal on the pasture yet and I unassigned the animal to the pasture.
Also, large glass pistons cant be used for the seismic telegraph.