There are few things capable of making British weather more ridiculous.
A haddock would probably do it.
We are accustomed to rain. We have drizzle, showers, downpours, mizzle, cloudbursts and that particularly British variety which appears to be coming sideways regardless of which direction you happen to be facing.
But what we do not generally expect is for the rain to contain wildlife. And yet stories of animals falling from the sky have been recorded for centuries. Fish are particularly popular. Frogs turn up with alarming regularity. There have also been reports involving tadpoles, worms, snails and various other unfortunate creatures who presumably began their day somewhere entirely different.
Put up your brolly and don your Sou’westers, people. Let’s get busy with the drizzle 🙂
At first glance, this belongs firmly in the same category as raining blood, stones from heaven and the Kentucky Meat Shower – the sort of thing somebody claims happened to their grandfather’s neighbour and which becomes considerably more impressive with every retelling. But, unfortunately for anyone hoping to dismiss the whole lot as folklore, some animal falls are surprisingly well documented.
Including this one in Wales.
In February 1859, an extraordinary event was reported near Aberdare. According to an account subsequently published in The Zoologist, a shower of small fish fell during heavy rain. Not beside a river or washed out of an overflowing pond it came from above.
The report attracted the attention of John Edward Gray, one of the leading zoologists of his day and Keeper of Zoology at the British Museum. Specimens were apparently collected, which is always where these stories become more interesting. A witness saying that fish fell from the sky is peculiar. A zoologist being sent the fish is considerably harder to wave away.
The Aberdare specimens were described as small freshwater fish. Contemporary discussion attempted to establish exactly what they were and where they might have come from. The obvious problem was that fish are not particularly well equipped for atmospheric travel. They have no wings. They are famously poor climbers. And spontaneous flight remains beyond even the most determined trout.
So how does a fish get into the sky?
The answer may begin with something almost as strange. A waterspout. Waterspouts are rotating columns of air over water. Some form in association with severe thunderstorms and behave rather like tornadoes over the surface of the sea or a lake. Others are less violent, but all involve rotating air and water spray.
The popular explanation for raining animals goes something like this:
A waterspout or powerful updraught passes over a body of water. Small animals near the surface are lifted. They are carried some distance through the atmosphere. The wind weakens. Gravity remembers its responsibilities. It rains fish.
There is nothing physically impossible about small objects or animals being carried by powerful winds. Storms routinely move debris over considerable distances, and tornadoes are capable of lifting objects considerably heavier than a frog. That doesn’t mean, however, that every story about raining animals has been solved and this is where things become more interesting than the usual explanation suggests.
For a start, nobody generally watches the entire journey. We get the end. People see fish lying across a road after a storm, or frogs appearing on wet ground, and then have to reconstruct how they arrived there. Sometimes a waterspout is known to have occurred nearby. Sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes the animals are all of a similar species and size, which seems to support the idea that they were picked up together from one particular environment. Sometimes the reports are so vague that almost anything could have happened. And sometimes the animals may never have fallen at all.
Frogs provide a particularly good example. After heavy rain, enormous numbers of tiny frogs can suddenly appear in places where nobody noticed them before. They haven’t necessarily fallen from the clouds, young frogs emerging from ponds or hiding places can become conspicuous almost simultaneously when conditions are wet. To someone walking outside and discovering hundreds of tiny frogs covering the ground after a downpour, “it rained frogs” is not an unreasonable first impression. Fish are slightly more difficult to explain away like that. They are generally noticeable when they start lying on roads.
Historical newspapers loved these stories. Of course they did. If I were editing the Derbyshire Times in 1887 and somebody arrived to tell me that it had rained perch in Bakewell, that story would be on the front page before the fish had stopped twitching. The problem for us, more than a century later, is separating the event from the newspaper version of the event. A report gets copied, another paper adds a detail. A later writer summarises both. Someone eventually writes that thousands of fish fell over several miles during a perfectly clear afternoon despite the original account merely describing a handful found after a storm. Then the internet gets hold of it.
Suddenly there are sharks.
But this doesn’t mean all animal falls are fictional. It means each one needs examining on its own evidence. Scientists were already trying to do exactly that more than a century ago.
In 1917, naturalist Waldo McAtee published a review of showers of organic matter in the Monthly Weather Review. Reports involving animals, plants and other materials were collected and considered alongside possible meteorological mechanisms.
In 1929, zoologist E. W. Gudger devoted an entire paper in Scientific Monthly to a wonderfully straightforward question:
Do fish fall from the sky with rain?
The answer, broadly, was that credible reports existed. But the mechanism was another matter. We know that strong winds can lift animals. We know that waterspouts exist. We know that tornadoes and severe storms transport debris. From those facts it is entirely reasonable to conclude that at least some animal falls are meteorological events. But saying “waterspout” does not magically reconstruct an event nobody observed.
Where was the water source?
When were the animals lifted?
How high did they travel?
How far?
Why were those particular animals deposited in that particular place?
Often we simply don’t know. And I rather like that. Not because we need supernatural explanations. Quite the opposite, in fact. The natural world is perfectly capable of being bizarre without any help from us.
Imagine being a small fish minding your own business in a Welsh pond. There is weather. Things become unexpectedly energetic. You experience what must be the most confusing few minutes in the history of fish. And shortly afterwards a Victorian zoologist is examining you because you have apparently fallen out of the sky over Aberdare. No gods, no omens, no dimensional portals. Just meteorology behaving badly.
The phrase “raining cats and dogs” probably doesn’t describe a forgotten era when terriers regularly fell over Britain, thankfully. But raining fish? That one we shouldn’t dismiss quite so quickly. Because occasionally the old impossible stories turn out not to be impossible at all. They just require the weather to get sufficiently weird.
And somewhere, presumably, a deeply bewildered frog.
