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I recently acquired a tame blue jay in a cage that I bought from the Elven trading caravan.

I have a reasonable egg production farm up and running with domestic egg laying creatures, like ducks and turkeys, and I was wondering if I would be able to add to this with my recent acquisition.

I noticed in the raws that blue jays (and a number of other vermin creatures) have the [LAYS_EGGS] configuration value, but because it is technically considered vermin and there is no mention of this type of creature on the df wiki page for egg laying animals, I am unsure whether it will actually lay eggs.

If I provide a nest box for a tame, egg-laying vermin, will it lay eggs that I can cook into food for my dwarves?

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Vermin have meat, leather, and eggs, but such reagents are not actually harvestable in-game. Vermin may be due for a rewrite soon, as there are extant creatures in-game that are smaller than some vermin (chickens). – Raven Dreamer♦ Sep 20 '11 at 17:09
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Awesome title! I totally envisioned dwarves harvesting roach eggs or something. – andronikus Sep 20 '11 at 21:25
I think i've embarked with roach brains before... – Russell Mar 19 '12 at 15:38

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Vermin are handled rather "specially" in that they are spawned from nothing and de-spawned again, and that they can't really run around freely even when tamed (though you can try dumping them - which leads to your local vermin hunter population making a quick job out of them and some oddities with the unit display). As such, even if they could lay eggs, they'd never reach the nest box by themselves, and certainly won't stay there hatching anything.

(Version 0.31.25)

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So even though it's tame, there's not really much use for it? – jaminja Sep 20 '11 at 8:59
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You can add it to the list of pets available for adoption, and if there's some dwarf who likes them, they'll (eventually) adopt them, carry them around in their inventory, and get happy thoughts because of it. – Martin Sojka Sep 20 '11 at 9:17

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