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[Dampe]

Really, a hunter is not at all necessary for a starting fort. What is necessary however, is a grower. Which is absent from your selected group.

Actually, it isn't, I just failed to mention it.
My weapon smith/cook is also a brewer, grower, and herbalist.
My bad.

[Dampe]

Also, I've never tried taking one at embark, but I've found that fisherdwarves are EXTREMELY useful when they migrate to my fort.

I've used fisherdwarves before, and I agree, they are quite useful.
I just don't know where I can cram that skill in.

[Panando]

It's not worth embarking with a hunter. Hunting is okay (although I prefer to use squads and order them to kill - it's just as effective, and under your control - hunters love to do so many stupid things) but the thing is that marksdwarf is very very quick to train by shooting at live targets, once you've got up to competentish, it's plenty effective for killing wildlife. There is also no great hurry, since you can slaughter your pack animals for yummies which will last a season or two.

Hence, even if you want to hunt from near the beginning of the game, you may as well just make the required stuff after embarking (I recommend wooden bolts since they are super quick to make, bone bolts are a good use for immigrants), you might want to embark with leather or a quiver although you can tan the hide of a pack animal for that purpose. In fact it's one of the tricks to the 0 pt embark on a treeless map:
Slaughter pack animal = hide + bones. Hide = leather = quiver. Bones = crossbow + bolts. Crossbow + bolts + quiver = Marksdwarf. Then put the marksdwarf in a squad and have it cripple animals, which the rest of the dwarves kick, punch and bite to death.

[Arcvasti]

I don't like hunting. Giving a dwarf a kill order on wildlife usually works[I am not responsible for any elephant related deaths from sending unarmoured wrestler dwarves hunting.]. Weapons and armour help. Hunting CAN work pretty well, but I've never found it worth it. Its especially useful in clearing the map of flying birds if you want to hunt larger game continuously.

[Henny]

On the one hand, just getting the military to do the killing is more efficient. On the other hand, making sure the dwarves haul back the prize seems to be a rather hit-and-miss affair, especially since I go rather easy on refuse sweeping when starting out...

[Larix]

Non-citizen corpses are refuse and corpses on aboveground squares will only be collected by refuse haulers if you set 'o'rders - 'r'efuse - 'o'utside refuse collection. Hunters are an exception, bringing in the catch is directly tied to the hunting job, regardless of hauling labour settings. Incidentally, 'F'orbid orders on 'other' (i.e. non-citizen) corpses also explicitely exclude hunted corpses.

If you have enough haulers and the proper refuse hauling orders, collecting corpses of animals killed by the military is not a problem. Hunters do it autonomously and less reliably (and they'll endanger themselves by sleeping outside). Hunters can be used, but making a designated hunter at the start isn't really worth it - to be effective, a hunter must pick up quite a lot of ambushing (and archery) skills, much more than you can buy at embark, and they self-train reasonably quickly. You can jumpstart your hunting industry by butchering a single wagon-puller - leather for the quiver, bones for one crossbow and some bolts. Wood's a decent option to replenish bolts if the hunter's not successful on the first few runs.

Given enough time, hunters are likely to drive your local animals to extinction. Starting out with six hunters, while amusing, causes wildlife to run out after about five years.

[PDF urist master]

once movement and attack speeds become split though, hunters might become more viable since it'll be harder to catch up to wild animals with squads.