Massive siege just hit us, and instead of waiting them out I put the king's henchmen... errr... sword and spear lords to work, alongside a few of my own trained melee. The couple of elite marksmen took out a couple of markdwarves on the ramparts, and the melees pretty much chewed through all the siege in two waves. I cut off the rest of them from the trolls when I raised the drawbridge in the middle of their charge.
However, during all this... I missed something. Orshar Hellriddle, a giant woodpecker with poisonous mandibles snuck into the cavern breach area somehow. As far as I know, the entire thing is locked down, but he got in somehow. I've got search tunnels all over god's creation for fortification breaches to map the caverns and a giant drop tunnel. It could be... anywhere. This is one of the reasons I only breach from the bailey tunnel.
Orshar snuck into the minecart testing facility while the majority of the fort was distracted by the siege, which apparently had a few buckets some poor hauler wanted during the civ alert. He didn't make it. I'd even seen the combat report go by and it didn't click that the poor guy was getting whomped on by an FB. Currently my marksdwarves, who apparently didn't have enough time to go back for ammo, are trying to beat it down with their crossbows. I had a swordsdwarf who hacked a good number of pieces out of him, but he just ran away for some reason.
Eventually one of my axelords got in there with a masterwork steel battle axe, and proceeded to treat the woodpecker like the trees it once haunted. hack hack hack he slowly brought the thing down to his level, and another axe and sword lord joined in the fun. They proceeded to treat the thing's head like a giant drum, and drummed out a tune that didn't really fit well with the constant squawking the bird made. Eventually, it bled to death with multiple skull fractures, both wings torn off, its legs hacked to pieces, and profusely bleeding from its belly.
Now I need to get the military put back together. Between the two events the hospitals going to be very busy.
On a positive note I've found I had a place to do a straight 120z drop from the sedimentary ore straight to the magma forge level without breaching the caverns. With that dug out I've begun running tests to try to get a major ore dump mining project to work without power in any way. After finishing testing on the impulse elevator and determining that for some reason or another any impulse elevator will derail on exit, simply finding the 'stop point' of the derail and using an impulse ramp there will re-rail the cart and get it going again. It might, on occassion, take two impulses, but you can get back underway with minimal fuss and no loss of contents. I tried it with water. If anything was going to 'spill', that should have.
One other thing... I found out that Trolls and Gray Langurs and the occassional goblin can swim. I breached the first cavern, which is mostly lakes, from my cage storage (in the bailey tunnel). With a hatch over a large lake, I simply started dumping in all the bodies I didn't need that were filling up my lists. A few of them lived. Whatta ya know.