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[Larix]

Looking through wikipedia, i found no serious discussion of systematic animal messenging that didn't depend on pigeons and pigeons only, so "anything that flies and can find home from ten kilometres away" may be a _bit_ too broad to be a serious option.

Notably, pigeons travel to their home, being quite strictly bound to their actual abode and partner (and young). In addition, the rock pigeons used as messenger birds are so apt for the role because they _don't_ migrate - they stick to their nest the whole year, pretty much their entire life. A migratory bird would be completely useless as messenger for ~half the year, because it'd naturally gravitate to its other habitat, i.e. it simply wouldn't be around to carry messages. Many migratory birds won't return to their exact nesting place, either, they'll just build a new nest or switch to a completely different area.

Flocking birds _may_ end up joining a random flock they encounter - homing pigeons that lose their way or get distracted tend to join the common domesticated/feral pigeon flocks in cities.

Many animals with great navigational abilities simply aren't instinctively bound to a location: they may be able to return to a place of origin, but they attach no special importance to that place, so they don't; at least not in a timely or predictable fashion.

So while animal messengers sound great fun, i don't really think the variety of applicable species is all that large - practically anything other than pigeons will be a chore to work with and horrendously unreliable. Bats may be an option, if they roost in caves with dwarven access, but will be quite sharply limited by climate (only active when there are insects around, may migrate). Of course, there's always the crazy option: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0000949 - while quite slow and limited to coastal routes, at least that's a messenger that won't easily be intercepted.

I'm not convinced dwarfs would really go for this - birds and bats are _flying_ creatures, thus inhabitants of the open air, which might feel altogether too elven/human to them. I'd think dwarfs would focus on "technological" messenging - semaphores and the like. With the right mineral composition, couldn't you send acoustic messages through the rock, as well? Think "banging on the pipes", just with a massive ram to do the banging and complicated amplifiers to listen from a hundred kilometres away.

[SixOfSpades]

animals that almost always migrate in herds / flocks / schools are less well suited for acting alone.

You mean like pigeons? 

While pigeons are the obvious exception due to their real-world use, Larix did point out their biggest flaw: Their tendency to flock (rather than family) can cause the proximity of Flock B to override the desire to home to Family A. Birds with smaller, closer-knit family units, like vultures, would be far less likely to "fail" in this regard.
Not that I'm suggesting dwarves would have anything to do with vultures. Leave them for the goblins.

The issue of prey animals being more juicy looking alone, is an issue though. Not a game breaker, since carrier pigeons don't exactly get eaten by hawks 80% of the time or anything, but it's an issue. a species-specific random number generator on getting eaten wouldn't be unreasonable.

Agreed. Pigeons & the like would be best released 3 at a time, carrying identical messages, so at least one is almost assured of reaching its destination.

dogs & wolves

Dunno how well they navigate. However, yes, this is obviously a lot better than reindeer. Still super slow compared to birds (50 mph versus like, 5?)

Slow, yes, but their advantage is in hardiness. A wolf could cross a snowy mountain range, while a pigeon would most likely have to fly around it. Also, a canine's larger size would (logically, although not yet implemented) make it far more resistant to the effects of Evil weather. As for navigation, I expect that accompanying (and guarding) the caravan on 2 or 3 trips there & back would be enough to teach them the route.

I'm discounting the possibility of parrots & other talking birds actually verbalizing the message at the receiving end, because of the time it would take to train the bird to accurately repeat that ONE specific phrase, which likely couldn't even be longer than a few seconds.

Well, as seen both in your Tolkien samples and here (the very first paragraph), you could use verbal messages if you knew the "language" of the animal in question. Even though it's not realistic, DF is a fantasy game after all.

Well, the Tolkien quotes were submitted without comment, just examples of "here's what the original (modern) source material has to say on the subject." It must be emphasized that Toady's dwarves are NOT Tolkien's dwarves, and while DF does contain many obvious elements of pure fantasy, it is far more grounded in reality. So we're likely going to find some middle ground between literary precedent ("Certain bird species are fully capable of both sentient intelligence and conversational speech!") and the cold, hard facts ("Um, no, actually they're not."). I think a fair compromise would be to use the Tolkien & Threetoe excerpts as examples of which animals dwarves (and humans) have an affinity for, but not necessarily treat their statement of the animals' intellectual capacities as gospel.

maybe you could have both the normal pigeons/bats who only carry a piece of paper from their nest to the feeding place; and more intelligent animal messangers, trained most likely by a druid. (Yay for dwarven druids!)

Eh, elven druids only, please. Dwarven priests of specific gods that happen to have "animals" in their domain might do the same, but no others. In both cases, the "intelligent messenger" could be a normally dumb animal that has been given the temporary ability to recite a message by a specific spell cast upon it by the druid / priest.
This is likely the most appropriate time to link to this comic!

Looking through wikipedia, i found no serious discussion of systematic animal messenging that didn't depend on pigeons and pigeons only, so "anything that flies and can find home from ten kilometres away" may be a _bit_ too broad to be a serious option.

True, but Wikipedia also says that bats are really cool, and live in caves & stuff. But seriously, in a game with fire-breathing dragons, I don't see why we can't stretch the truth enough to give each intelligent race an affinity with at least one (different) creature that could plausibly carry messages a long distance to a fixed destination. And because real-life humans use pigeons, let the Humans use Pigeon (Tame)s.

In addition, the rock pigeons used as messenger birds are so apt for the role because they _don't_ migrate - they stick to their nest the whole year, pretty much their entire life. A migratory bird would be completely useless as messenger for ~half the year, because it'd naturally gravitate to its other habitat, i.e. it simply wouldn't be around to carry messages.

True that. I, personally, have been largely sticking to migratory animals because they display the capacity for long-range travel to a known destination. Therefore, transitioning those animals into DF, and taking away their propensity to actually migrate, would at least make them plausible messengers.

I'd think dwarfs would focus on "technological" messenging - semaphores and the like. With the right mineral composition, couldn't you send acoustic messages through the rock, as well? Think "banging on the pipes", just with a massive ram to do the banging and complicated amplifiers to listen from a hundred kilometres away.

A good tangent. Listening devices were employed during WWII, primarily by the British, to detect incoming bombing raids. Most took the form of horns that could be aimed to listen in a particular direction (Google "WWII listening devices"), although I see there are also some rigid structures, stone walls with a parabolic dish carved out of one side, to focus sounds coming from one specific origin. Naturally, this would only work for medium-distance communication, but if your Mountainhome is only roughly 50 miles away, a large trumpet (or trumpets) at one city, aimed at a parabolic collector in another city, sounds like precisely the sort of thing a Legendary Engineer would invent.

Seismic messaging is a possibility, but IMO a highly inefficient one. Because the signal spreads equally in all directions, only a tiny fraction goes in the intended direction, and there are all sorts of underground differences in density that can throw off the signal, and of course the vibration can travel only a very short distance anyway. More feasible would be a continuous metal tube, with air pressure driving a sealed capsule back & forth. But then there's the problem of installing that tube: Underground, you have to dig a passageway large enough for dwarves to fit through--and if you're going to go to that trouble, why not just build a whole road, sealed from all outside interference? And if you lay the tube on (or reburied slightly under) the surface, you risk enemies discovering the tube, breaching it, and stealing the messages--or worse, altering them & sending them on.

[TacoSundae84]

We have sentient birdmen in the game who can talk and fly. Your kingdom making agreements with some of the bird people tribes for the purpose of message delivery doesn't sound that crazy. Someone mentioned making the pigeon handler a noble, but why not make the pigeon man a noble instead, at least in terms of them not doing any work around the fortress while they're there. I imagine a tribe of kea men could be hired with shinies to have some of their members do this work. Or perhaps in exchange for letting their tribe stay on certain dwarf-occupied lands, they have some of their members be messengers. There's several scenarios that could make this work that would be dependent on your civilization's ethics and how your culture views animal people.

I'm just throwing this out there because I'd really like to see some interaction with animal men in the game that didn't involve indiscriminate slaughter, and this seems like a good first step.

[Dirst]

We have sentient birdmen in the game who can talk and fly. Your kingdom making agreements with some of the bird people tribes for the purpose of message delivery doesn't sound that crazy. Someone mentioned making the pigeon handler a noble, but why not make the pigeon man a noble instead, at least in terms of them not doing any work around the fortress while they're there. I imagine a tribe of kea men could be hired with shinies to have some of their members do this work. Or perhaps in exchange for letting their tribe stay on certain dwarf-occupied lands, they have some of their members be messengers. There's several scenarios that could make this work that would be dependent on your civilization's ethics and how your culture views animal people.

I'm just throwing this out there because I'd really like to see some interaction with animal men in the game that didn't involve indiscriminate slaughter, and this seems like a good first step.

I like this idea, though the player should be able to employ trained animals as a fallback in case no appropriate animal men are around (or the player has made them hostile).  One advantage of the animal man is that it can carry a lot more, perhaps a mail service that brings happy thoughts to your citizens who have friends/relatives hither and yon.

[StagnantSoul]

This is Dwarf Fortress, not real life! While very realistic in many regards, I've never seen bats sleeping on roofs or upside down in trees, or migrating. Only flying in and out through the caves, which, apparently, all connect, one way or another. Real life humans never road grizzlies into war, did they? Then why should dwarven animal relations be the same as real life humans?