Our year-in-review Special looks back at the wacky, weird, and wondrous stories of 2014.

Tipsy Tweets
Environment Yukon set up a drunk tank for birds that get a bit tipsy after gorging on fermented berries to bulk up for cold weather. After a frost, berries produce alcohol, and some birds, especially Bohemian waxwings, “do, in fact, get drunk”, according to EY spokesperson Meghan Larivee. “So they’re flying around but they’re not as good at avoiding obstacles,” Larivee said, noting that they are put in a hamster cage “so they can sober up”.

Lots of scratch
In May, a Long Island, New York, town approved a $20,000 settlement to the family of a young girl who suffered facial lacerations after being attacked by a rooster at a town petting zoo.

Donkey tail
“It’s a level of absurdity…that has been crossed to such an extent that I don’t even want to read or know about this.”—Adam Hoffman, spokesperson for Polish conservative party Law and Justice, about an uproar caused when one of his party’s politicians, Lydia Dudziak, persuaded the director of a zoo in Poznan to place donkeys Napoleon and Antosia in separate pens after mothers complained about the animals mating in front of child zoo visitors. After the forced divorce became a major news story and 7,000 people signed a petition to reunite the donkeys, the zoo restored their living arrangements.

Danse Macabre
Fourteen new species of tiny, endangered “dancing” frogs have been discovered in India’s Western Ghats mountain range after a 12-year investigation by researchers. Lead scientist Sathyabhama Das Biju, of the University of Delhi, said the elation over the discoveries—which bring the known number of dancing-frog species to 24—was tempered by the widespread environmental degradation and changing climate in the frogs’ habitat, 80 percent of which is outside protected areas: “It’s like a Hollywood movie, both joyful and sad…in some places, it was as if nature itself was crying.”

Dog days
Some residents of the southern Chinese city of Yulin, weary of being targeted by protesters because of a summer-solstice celebration in which thousands of dogs are slaughtered and eaten, held their festival feasts early this year. Chinese microbloggers nonetheless circulated photos of skinned and cooked dogs hanging from hooks. Increasing affluence, international travel, and the keeping of pets are changing the way some Chinese feel about such traditions, which, in this case, are reputed to keep feasters healthy during winter.

Pussy Riot
“I do not see a vicious cat. I do not see a killer.” —Jackson Galaxy, star of the TV reality show My Cat From Hell, about the notorious Portland, Oregon, feline named Lux. The infamous puss, which attacked a baby and terrorized a family from outside a barricaded bedroom, was placed with another family but had to be removed again after it menaced them as well. Galaxy has since placed the animal with a veterinary clinic, where it is receiving medication and other treatment.

Pride goeth after a fall
A groundhog that fell from New York City mayor Bill de Blasio’s hands during a Groundhog Day ceremony at the Staten Island Zoo died of internal injuries a week after the tumble. The New York Post revealed that the zoo didn’t tell the mayor’s office about the death, and zoo spokesman Brian Morris insisted: “We don’t know how the animal suffered the injuries but we don’t think it was from the fall.”

Shell game
After three reported incidents of attempted turtle-smuggling by Canadian residents—involving 70 and 51 of the reptiles in two apprehensions at the Detroit-Windsor border crossing and 1,007 China-bound turtles at a Detroit airport—a turtle expert blamed an increase in the animals’ popularity as pets after the release of the movie Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. “Kids, with their imagination, are thinking if they got four of them, maybe they’ll turn into the ninja turtles,” said Steve Mark, a former turtle rescuer who used to work for Ontario’s parks department. Complicated import permits are required to bring turtles into Canada, and Mark said he knows of one species that sells for $25 in the U.S. but retails for $600 in Canada.

Sandbox stakeout
After 200 police officers and soldiers fruitlessly combed the countryside around the French town of Montévrain east of Paris after sightings of a large cat thought by some people to be an escaped tiger, regional authorities declared the feline—caught in several blurry photos—to be of an unknown species but not a tiger.

From bridge to table
According to Dutch newspaper Het Parool, an Amsterdam pest-control company commissioned to rid areas of the city of pigeons—called “flying rats” by the Dutch—sells up to 1,000 of them a year to butchers who turn them into wildpate, a delicacy normally derived from rural wood pigeons. “Pigeons are not protected, so you can catch them,” explained company spokesperson Arle den Hertog van Duke.

Moo angels
Police in the central German town of Rasdorf said an explosion in a farm building that burned a cow and damaged the roof was the result of a buildup of methane gas from the flatulence of 90 cows. “A static-electric charge caused the gas to explode with flashes of flames,” police said in a statement.

Lavatory-tested
“It is still enigmatic.”—From a two-year joint German-Czech study that followed 70 unleashed dogs and recorded 7,475 urinations and defecations before coming to the conclusion that dogs almost without exception do their business along a north-south axis aligned with the Earth’s magnetic field. What the scientists were unable to determine, however, was the reason this occurred.