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Weather's Animal Instincts

© Amy Marquis

They came tumbling, plummeting, freefalling from the sky, their delicate green skin half-frozen from their tumultuous journey. As they struck the ground, each with a dull thud, the living hailstones began to blanket every surface, challenging anyone who dared touch the earth to levitate in order to avoid the inevitable.

Sound familiar, like any biblical plague you know? They say “truth is stranger than fiction.” On one dreary day in 1939, reality was just plain unbelievable! Sun worshippers at an outdoor swimming pool in the English town of Trowbidge saw the sky cloud over, turning from gray to green, when hundreds of frogs began raining from the heavens. When asked by The Times about her experience, one eyewitness summed it up by saying, "It was a job to walk on the path without treading on them.”

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The madness doesn’t end there! There are other abnormal animal anecdotes that dot the landscape of weather history. On July 12, 1873, sixty-six years before the British experienced their amphibian nightmare, the residents of Kansas City, Mo., had one of their own. Scientific American reported a swathe of frogs dumped across the city when a storm passed overhead.

If you think frogs are unappealing, imagine something on the sub-insect level. That’s right, there have been accounts of maggots falling from the sky! During a 1968 yacht race in Acapulco, Mexico, boats became covered with the slimy pre-insects after a thunderstorm vomited the tiny beings on the unfortunate people below.

Mother Nature has been known to undertake even larger pursuits in the realm of peculiar precipitation. On occasion, dead birds and fish have actually fallen from above, partly frozen.

If it seems impossible, just ask any meteorologist for an explanation. The phenomenon is courtesy of thunderstorms, tornadoes and waterspouts. When one of these fierce systems passes over a body of water, the updrafts within can inhale neighborhood wildlife in the process. After taking a jaunt miles upwards into the clouds, where temperatures can be absolutely frigid, these ill-fated creatures are frozen through. As the clouds build and produce the right conditions for a storm, the animals can be treated just like precipitation and fall back to earth where they started.

The skies obviously don't rain animals every day, but the experience has been recorded throughout history. Just hope the next time the skies open up to deliver something unexpected, it’s not raining cats and dogs!

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