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Animal Falls: Falls Or Rains Of Animals (Frogs, Fish, Etc.)

Texarkana fish rain had unexpected and unpleasant source (press release)

The fish that fell in a December thunderstorm likely came from the nervous stomachs of birds that ejected their recent meal, investigators conclude.

An intense thunderstorm on December 29, 2021 brought dozens, if not hundreds, of small fish falling with the rain and hail over a four-mile swath of Texarkana. Paul Cropper, an Australian researcher of anomalous phenomenon, collected evidence that led him and colleague Sharon A. Hill (U.S.) to the unsavory origin of the fish rain - regurgitated bird stomach contents. Their conclusions are published in the July 2022 issue of Fortean Times magazine.

Cropper collected firsthand accounts from business employees, airport staff, and residents across town who found the fish strewn across the landscape. The two investigators also obtained assistance from scientists at the University of Texas Biodiversity Center in Austin. The fish, identified as Gizzard shad, had characteristics indicative of partial digestion. The researchers strongly suspect the fish had been eaten by cormorants (a common, large shore bird). Then shortly after, the birds, at least some of which were airborne, were caught up in the storm front and disgorged their meals.

Texarkana Regional Airport officials and a resident had noted the presence of cormorants around the time of the storm. Cormorants are common in large numbers and are known to exhibit the disturbing habit of expelling their stomach contents. The reason for this behavior is unknown.

Rains of fish have been reported for centuries, but direct evidence showing fish definitively falling from the sky was lacking, until now. Cropper collected photos and videos from locals who found the fish on streets, sidewalks, grass, parking lots and the airport runway. More importantly, fish remains were found in truck beds and on roofs - indicating that they fell from some height. He obtained high resolution security footage from Discount Wheel & Tire on Summerhill Road that appears to show six fish impacting the ground during the storm. Employees collected many dead fish from their parking lot after the rain. This footage appears to be the first video documentation of fish falling from the sky during a rain event. (
“Texas Rain Of Fish December 2021”)

While many media outlets reported that the fish were sucked up by a waterspout and dropped some distance away, this hypothesis has never been documented and does not fit the evidence in Texarkana. Additionally, Cropper and Hill confirmed no waterspout occurred during this storm and no other human-related distribution of fish via aircraft or by hand was plausible. The bird theory remains the best fit for the evidence. Samples of the fish were retained by the University staff for further testing.
 
How fortuitous. After the media coverage we got for the bird vomit story in Texarkana, another story is out in San Fransisco about birds overindulging on anchovies and letting them loose around town. This is happening without a storm event.
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/raining-fish-in-san-francisco-17272717.php

Considering perhaps several other fish rain events, I think we can confidently say birds should be a primary consideration for such events now, not waterspouts.
 
It's "raining" anchovies in the San Francisco Bay area ...
It's raining anchovies in San Francisco

It's raining fish in San Francisco, and locals are finding anchovies in unlikely places around the Bay Area, including sidewalks, driveways, rooftops and bus stops.

Experts believe the fishy precipitation is the result of a surge in coastal anchovy populations ...

Earlier this month, the Otolith Geochemistry and Fish Ecology Laboratory ... advised the local community of an "anchovy spawn" event taking place in the lower portion of the San Francisco Bay, marking the episode as the "second-highest monthly total we have ever seen." Experts believe that seabirds are taking advantage of this bounty, and the birds don't know what to do with the embarrassment of riches. As a result, they are dropping fish from the sky like torpedoes as they indulge in the sudden all-you-can-eat buffet. ...

Reports of the fishy fallout have been recorded across the Bay Area, including in San Francisco's Outer Richmond and Castro neighborhoods. One local told SF Gate they "heard a whoosh sound behind me and heard a massive splat" while another "almost got hit by a fish waiting for the bus" ...
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FULL STORY: https://www.livescience.com/raining-anchovy-fish-san-francisco

See Also:
Anchovies are reportedly raining from the sky across San Francisco
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/raining-fish-in-san-francisco-17272717.php
 
The forum's own Sharon Hill in the news:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/t...solved/ar-AAZbwTR?ocid=mailsignout&li=BBnb7Kz

Mysterious Incident of Fish Raining From The Sky May Have Been Solved​

Paul Richards
Did it rain fish in Texarkana, Texas/Arkansas, last December? Or did a massive gulp of cormorants spontaneously hurl their payloads? Sharon Hill, an independent researcher from Pennsylvania, and Paul Cropper, an author from Australia, investigated the odd phenomenon and have come to a conclusion: It was the regurgitating gulp.

"We're both interested in finding out what, if anything, happened in a strange situation," Hill told the Dallas Morning News at the onset of their investigation. "We're not going to be dismissive, we're not going to default to a paranormal explanation, but we're looking to document what happened and what can be the possible natural causes."

The strange situation occurred when Gizzard shad seemed to rain from the Texarkana skies during a thunderstorm at the end of last year. Multiple residents reported their encounters with the fish and shared photos and videos through social media.

Experts hypothesized that the storm whipped up a tornadic waterspout from the resident lake, lifting a school of small fish into the air and dropping them in a less friendly environment. It has been known to happen. But, National Weather Service meteorologist Brandon Thorne said there was no evidence backing that theory. “As we looked at the storm and went back and looked at the data, we really didn’t find anything that would indicate that there was any kind of waterspout,” Thorne told the Dallas Morning News. “We’re kind of confused as to how it happened as well, to be honest.”

So Hill and Cropper took up the case. First, they considered whether the whole thing was just a hoax. But too many eyewitnesses reported consistent accounts—in four different sections of town—of 12 to 30 fish on the ground. City officials had received numerous calls. At the airport, crews had shoveled up ten pounds of fish, delaying one flight. Video evidence had even surfaced.

So, Hill and Cropper looked into other possible explanations. They, too, found no evidence of a tornado, a waterspout, or flooding (some fish were found on rooftops). They checked flight records to rule out the possibility that the shad had been accidentally dropped from an airplane. There were no flights at the time.

Finally, the pair received a tip, implicating avian suspects. Residents told Hill and Cropper that large flocks of cormorants (known as gulps) typically flew over the airport at the time that storm had occurred. Some of the fish, Hill and Cropper found, seemed partially digested. And cormorants are known to regurgitate the contents of their stomachs.

The University of Texas Biodiversity Center in Austin will verify the findings. However, Hill told the Dallas Morning News, she is confident that she and Cropper have solved the mystery.
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I went to see my mum in hospital on Sunday. She's 83, just broken her hip, and is quite frail, but as far as I'm aware, she has her full mental faculties.

We were talking about the old days when we used to live in Norfolk and she used to give me a ride to school in the seat on the back of her bike. That would put me at about 4 or 5 years old maximum, so puts the date around 1966–7.

The place was central Norfolk on the road between Letton Hall and Cranworth, which narrows it down to about a mile of driveway and road, knowing the route we would have taken. (I started to cycle it alone a year or two later.)

She asked me if I remembered the time it was raining frogs. She described them falling out of the sky onto the road. She gave the standard explanation of them being lifted up by "a whirlwind or something" (not her exact words).

My mother has some strange ideas, but is essentially honest. I had no reason to think she was making it up.

Of all the so called Fortean subjects, fish falls and the like are one of the few that I consider to be truly Fortean. By that, I mean that there is a substantial body of credible evidence and testimony, but the "official response" put forward by the scientific community is unconvincing. If fish, or frogs, or any other small species, are scooped up by a whirlwind or water spout, why do the falls always seem to be of a single species? In our case, why were there frogs falling, but not, say, worms, or acorns, or field mice? Just frogs.

Of course, my mum could have been genuinely mistaken. Perhaps the rain brought the frogs out onto the road and she convinced herself that they had fallen?

I have no memory of the incident myself.
 
I see we have a classic fish fall reported from an inland community in Australia.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-02-21/outback-community-fish-rain-sky-weather-event/102002588

To summarise: - a fall of one species of freshwater fish (spangled perch)
- attributed to being picked up by the wind (but why only one species?)
- Still alive when they fell, despite being inland and a long way from large bodies of water
- One odd point is that this community has a record of this happening before.

Interesting reading.
 
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-02-21/outback-community-fish-rain-sky-weather-event/102002588

Fish 'rained from the sky', outback community says, in freak weather event​

By Charmayne Allison, Liz Trevaskis, and Alex Barwick

Residents of a remote outback community have been left marvelling at the heavens as fish "rained from the sky" in a surprising, but not unheard of, weather event.
Locals in Lajamanu, a community 560 kilometres south-west of Katherine on the northern edge of the Tanami Desert, said they were stunned to see the fish drop during heavy rainfall.
 
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Interesting link. Thanks for posting.

To me, fish falls are one of the true Fortean subjects. There is plenty of evidence that they happen, but the "accepted" scientific explanation sounds like no more than desperate guesswork.

If they are scooped out of the water by a waterspout, why are they usually made up of a single species? How are muscularly dense fish carried so far without being widely dispersed, and then dropped on a small area, often with many of them surviving the fall? Why is there never a whale and a bowl of petunias involved?
 
Salmonellus said:
I see we have a classic fish fall reported from an inland community in Australia.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-02-21/outback-community-fish-rain-sky-weather-event/102002588

To summarise: - a fall of one species of freshwater fish (spangled perch)
- attributed to being picked up by the wind (but why only one species?)
- Still alive when they fell, despite being inland and a long way from large bodies of water
- One odd point is that this community has a record of this happening before.

Interesting reading.
Click to expand...
Not buying this AT ALL. The documentation is completely absent to conclude that they fell, alive, via some "updrafts" and transport. The fact that it happened before suggests the fish escape from someplace and make their way across the land during rains and people find them and tell a fun story.
 
Sharon Hill said:
Not buying this AT ALL. The documentation is completely absent to conclude that they fell, alive, via some "updrafts" and transport. The fact that it happened before suggests the fish escape from someplace and make their way across the land during rains and people find them and tell a fun story.
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The recurrences are certainly one of the odder features of this story.

Several people reportedly saw them fall, one stating "We saw some free-falling down to the ground. And some falling onto the roof."

Fish making their way across land wouldn't end up on a roof, I guess. I know some fish do cross land - eels are notorious for it - but these spangled perch just look like ordinary water-dwellers.

On the other hand, Wikipedia suggests:

"In the interior of Australia this species may be found in any temporary waterbody, even wheel ruts flooded after rains.[2] This species is purported to appear in odd places following so called "rain of fish", as they are often observed scattered on the ground in the aftermath of heavy downpours. However, the fish have been transported to these places by flooding."

So the key question would be - what would be the nearest source of these fish from the community involved ?

And - it's a while since I've read Fort on this - do fish falls usually involve locally endemic species, or are they sometimes exotic types?
 
Though of course all similar-seeming events need not share the same etiology, I think it would be worthwhile to consider the other relatively recent fish-fall event that Sharon investigated. Didn't that turn out to be a case of mass bird-regurgitation?

Fish-eating birds at once solve all the problems of how a particular species of fish can be selected from underwater and transported into the clouds. Simultaneous mass regurgitation may be a little more difficult to explain, but I wonder whether panic at passing through the downdraft associated with a rain shaft may trigger an impulse in birds to discharge all possible ballast in order to avoid crashing.

As a meteorologist, I remain deeply suspicious of the idea that wind can pick up fish from underwater en masse.

Note: Edited to remove extra "the"
 
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Salmonellus said:
Several people reportedly saw them fall, one stating "We saw some free-falling down to the ground. And some falling onto the roof."
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I would have to see pics of fish on the rooftops. When we investigated the Texarkana fish fall, we FOUND several examples of fish landing in difficult places where they could only have "fallen" - roofs, restricted areas like the airport runway. And we had video of it.

I had an Australian scientist on Mastodon social platform tell me the following:

"Indeed the fish in the photo is a spangled grunter, a species that manages to survive in arid zone Australia by having an immense drive to disperse. There is a tale of one been found in a flooded wheel rut, 2 km from the creek crossing that it must have entered the rut at.
So in a flooding event with sheet wash over the ground these fish can appear as if they fell from the sky."

This explains the fish and the repeated frequency.
 
I asked ChatGPT for some unlikely explanations of fish falls:

Indeed, it is a rare but fascinating phenomenon when fish fall from the sky. Here are some unlikely explanations for this strange occurrence:

An overzealous fisherman accidentally catapulted his catch into the air.
A passing bird dropped a fish it had just caught, mistaking it for a small rock.
A group of mischievous dolphins decided to play catch with each other using a poor unsuspecting fish.
A nearby river flooded, causing the fish to be swept up into the air along with the rushing waters.
A highly advanced alien race decided to test their new teleportation device on a school of fish, accidentally sending them hurtling through Earth's atmosphere.

This is Computer-Generated Text - Mods.
 
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uair01 said:
I asked ChatGPT for some unlikely explanations of fish falls:

Indeed, it is a rare but fascinating phenomenon when fish fall from the sky. Here are some unlikely explanations for this strange occurrence:

An overzealous fisherman accidentally catapulted his catch into the air.
A passing bird dropped a fish it had just caught, mistaking it for a small rock.
A group of mischievous dolphins decided to play catch with each other using a poor unsuspecting fish.
A nearby river flooded, causing the fish to be swept up into the air along with the rushing waters.
A highly advanced alien race decided to test their new teleportation device on a school of fish, accidentally sending them hurtling through Earth's atmosphere.
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I'm impressed with ChatGPT. It only took five guesses to figure out what causes this phenomenon: alien fish teleportation experiments. Obvs.
 
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Sharon Hill said:
I vote to ban all references to and use of ChatGPT on this forum.
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You made me think with your remark.
At the first level I agree with you, AI text can be bland and full of platitudes.
But at the second level I was thinking: given the huge amount of text AI is trained with, it gives us a view into our global cultural subconscious. And that can be interesting.

And now I'm reading "Shape" by Jordan Ellenberg and he writes:

Messing around with Word2vec is like putting the collected writings of the Anglophone world on the psychoanalyst's couch and peeking into its grotty unconscious. :)
 
Residents in China told to use umbrellas as city hit by 'rain storm of worms'

Baffled Beijing residents were warned to use umbrellas after it started 'raining worms' in the Chinese capital city.

In recent days, a video has gone viral on social media showing "rain of worms" in the streets of the capital, with the slimy bugs covering cars.

1_Beijing-residents-told-to-use-umbrellas-as-city-hit-by-rain-storm-of-worms.jpg


El Heraldo reported that Beijing residents were told it was recommended to leave their home with umbrellas.

Some suggested they may actually be poplar flowers, a very popular tree in the area that is full of seeds and, when its flowers fall, they are often confused with caterpillars.

Another theory suggested that the worms were dropped after being swept up by a strong wind.

https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/world-news/residents-china-told-use-umbrellas-29403844

maximus otter
 
maximus otter said:
Residents in China told to use umbrellas as city hit by 'rain storm of worms'

Baffled Beijing residents were warned to use umbrellas after it started 'raining worms' in the Chinese capital city.

In recent days, a video has gone viral on social media showing "rain of worms" in the streets of the capital, with the slimy bugs covering cars.

1_Beijing-residents-told-to-use-umbrellas-as-city-hit-by-rain-storm-of-worms.jpg


El Heraldo reported that Beijing residents were told it was recommended to leave their home with umbrellas.

Some suggested they may actually be poplar flowers, a very popular tree in the area that is full of seeds and, when its flowers fall, they are often confused with caterpillars.

Another theory suggested that the worms were dropped after being swept up by a strong wind.

https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/world-news/residents-china-told-use-umbrellas-29403844

maximus otter
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I would bet poplar catkins. People are dumb, especially social media people.
 
maximus otter said:
Residents in China told to use umbrellas as city hit by 'rain storm of worms'

Baffled Beijing residents were warned to use umbrellas after it started 'raining worms' in the Chinese capital city.

In recent days, a video has gone viral on social media showing "rain of worms" in the streets of the capital, with the slimy bugs covering cars.

1_Beijing-residents-told-to-use-umbrellas-as-city-hit-by-rain-storm-of-worms.jpg


El Heraldo reported that Beijing residents were told it was recommended to leave their home with umbrellas.

Some suggested they may actually be poplar flowers, a very popular tree in the area that is full of seeds and, when its flowers fall, they are often confused with caterpillars.

Another theory suggested that the worms were dropped after being swept up by a strong wind.

https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/world-news/residents-china-told-use-umbrellas-29403844

maximus otter
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I have been in a rain of maggots/small caterpillars in the cloud forest in Peru... I suppose all the eggs were hatching at the same time and they were dropping out of the trees like rain. When it came to stop for lunch, I had to keep brushing them off my sandwich before taking a bite, fortunately they weren't a stinging variety. Having said that, they don't much look like caterpillars in the photo, more like catkins as others have pointed out.
 
Another fish fall. This one also resembles the Texarkana event but on a smaller scale. Bird regurgitation sounds like the plausible explanation.

‘Fishy’ mystery: Utah family discovers 16 dead fish in their backyard​

https://ksltv.com/574459/fishy-mystery-utah-family-discovers-16-dead-fish-in-their-backyard/
Jones said there were also no bodies of water nearby that could have washed the fish into the yard and that certainly wouldn’t have explained the two fish on the roof of the shed.
 
Reports on the local face ach of maggots' falling from the sky, not in the same league
as fish or frogs but a little odd.
 
Another case of a fish rain (Oklahoma). This is the time of year for them in the southern US!
Once again, a weather "expert" repeats the nonsense about water spouts but does note that this was almost certainly birds again, like the Texarkana event Paul Cropper and I researched and wrote up for FT.

‘A True Fish Tale:' OKC Cooper Middle School’s Fishy Mystery Stumps School Leaders​

A fishy discovery happened at a metro middle school. And the cause... is still up for 'de-bait'.
https://www.news9.com/story/657d2c2...-schools-fishy-mystery-stumps-school-leaders-

Oklahoma Principal Shocked to Find Fish on School Roof After Student Reports Them Falling From Sky​

Something fishy is going on at one Oklahoma middle school
https://themessenger.com/news/oklah...ol-roof-student-reports-them-falling-from-sky
 
It is very likely that many incidents reported of fish "rains" are a result of the fish swimming in ditches and even across roadways taking advantage of the deluge to spread to new areas.

Native fish swim across flooded Barkly Highway in remote NT after heavy rain, road closures​


Mr Eclipse said the conditions changed dramatically the closer they drove towards the Stuart Highway, where water was at times very deep.

It was around that point he and his family spotted something in the distance moving across the highway.
He thought that maybe the moving objects could be frogs awakened by the desert rain.

"We just saw lots of little black things crossing the road work ahead of us," he said.

"We didn't know what they were."

The family found a safe place to stop, then realised that they were in fact looking at fish swimming upstream in the middle of Australia's outback.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-04...im-across-flooded-barkly-highway-nt/103666948

[Mr. Eclipse?!? Gosh, that's an attention-getting name these days.}
 
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