Piscine in the wind
An examination of the authenticity of the age-old tales of fish and frogs falling from the skies
It was 7:45am on a foggy morning in late October 1947 and Dr Alexander Dimitrivitch Bajkov was in Marksville, Louisiana, enjoying his breakfast. The 52-year-old Russian-born émigré, one of America’s pre-eminent experts on freshwater fish, was in the Deep South conducting biological investigations for the US Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. As he sat with his wife in the local diner enjoying his morning eggs and coffee, their waitress approached with some alarming news. Outside, she said, fish were falling from the sky. As an expert on all matters piscine, Dr Bajkov was quick to identify that this wasn’t normal, even for Louisiana. Abandoning his eggs, he marched off to investigate.
As a youth, Dr Bajkov had escaped on skis from a gang of Bolsheviks holding him captive, and he had later spent time serving with the British Expeditionary Force, so life had not been without excitement, but this was something altogether different. There before his eyes, lying on the streets or resting atop parked cars, was a veritable fruits de mer. The fish covered an area approximately 300m long and 25m wide, and where they were at their most plentiful, outside the Marksville Bank on Main Street, the biologist counted an average of one per square yard. Cars and trucks continued to roll along Main Street and Monroe Street, quietly squishing fish beneath their wheels.
Dr Bajkov began to gather up the slippery visitors, which appeared to be native freshwater fish. They included the large-mouth black bass, the goggle eye, two species of sunfish and several different minnows and hickory shad. The largest of these was a nine inch bass. All were cold and fresh, though not frozen. Dr Bajkov also spoke with many of the excited locals who had witnessed this surreal deluge—the bank’s cashier reported being hit on the head by a falling fish, as did two local merchants, and they all told him how the fish had plummeted from the sky in a series of short bursts. The biologist transferred the very finest specimens from his catch into a large jar, in which he preserved them in Formalin before distributing them around various museums.
Stories of raining fish have been doing the rounds since ancient times. An early account can be found in The Deipnosophists—a compilation of extracts from classical writers, put together in the early third century AD by the Egyptian Athenæus of Naucratis. Athenæus wrote: “I know also that it has rained fishes. At all events Phœnias, in the second book of his Eresian Magistrates, says that in the Chersonesus it once rained fishes for three days, and Phylarchus, in his fourth book, says the people had often seen it raining fish.”
And rain it has continued to do: a deluge of whitings in Kent in 1666; a shower of herring in Galloway, Scotland in 1684; a downpour of periwinkles in Worcester in 1881. John Harriott, a British soldier serving in India, was marching with his regiment near Pondicherry in 1809 when a quantity of small fish fell on their heads, lodging on their hats. “General Smith desired them to be collected, and afterwards, when we came to our ground, they were dressed, making a small dish that was served up and eaten at the general’s table,” wrote Harriott. “These were not flying fish, they were dead, and falling from the common well-known effect of gravity; but how they ascended, or where they existed, I do not pretend to account.”
Frogs are also occasional visitors from the skies. In Trowbridge, Wiltshire on 16th June 1939, Mr E Ettles, the superintendent of the municipal swimming pool, found himself caught in a sudden heavy shower of rain. As he ran to find shelter, he heard behind him a sound like falling lumps of mud. “I turned,” he told a reporter from The Times, “and was amazed to see hundreds of tiny frogs falling on to the concrete path surrounding the bath. It was all over in a few seconds, but there must have been thousands of these tiny frogs, each about the size of the top of one’s finger. I swept them up and shoveled them into a bucket.”
Ettles destroyed the frogs “with a chemical”—a process upon which he thankfully fails to elaborate. He was a worldly man who had circumnavigated the globe, but nothing had prepared him for this amphibious drizzle. “I have seen flying fish and clouds of locusts,” he said, “but I have never before seen or heard of it raining frogs.”
Stories such as these have long been met with scepticism by certain men and women of science. As early as 1789, the Reverend Gilbert White, a renowned naturalist was objecting to “that foolish opinion of frogs dropping from the clouds in rain”. According to White, refreshing showers bring frogs out of their hiding places, providing a sudden carpeting of green and brown amphibians which, to a more credulous eye, might appear to have descended from above. W Sharpe, writing in 1875, suggested that the numerous stories of fish rains told by Sir JE Tennent in his Natural History of Ceylon could be explained by fish being left stranded by overflowing rivers or being caught migrating from one point to another.
Bergen Evans of the Northwestern University in Illinois, a famed debunker of pseudoscience, was a vociferous doubter of the veracity of fish rain stories. In a letter to the Science journal in 1946, he wrote that fish were likely to have been dropped by birds or blown from lakes in high winds. He wrote: “That many people have professed to believe in rains of fishes I am well aware. That many have observed fish on the ground after a heavy rain may be. But no trained observer has yet seen quantities of fish coming down out of the sky.”
The man who did the most to counter these objections was another American academic—Dr Eugene Gudger. Dr Gudger, who worked at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, was a fish-obsessive who spent much of his spare time compiling an exhaustive list of case studies of raining fish. In total he collected 78 ‘credible’ reports, spanning 2,350 years and six continents. He was utterly convinced of the weight of evidence behind these reports, and to his mind the main cause of these strange deluges was clear—a phenomenon known as a waterspout.
A waterspout is a type of tornado that occurs over a body of water. The rapidly rotating air in its vortex cools by expansion as it rises, and the consequent condensation of water vapour from the air forms a spectacular funnel-shaped cloud. To the untrained eye, it can appear that a solid column of water is being sucked from the sea, lake or river, colliding with the clouds above.
Waterspouts can be vast in size. One of the most closely studied was the Cottage City waterspout which formed in Massachusetts on 19th August 1896. The US Weather Bureau calculated that the funnel was 3,600 feet long, with a diameter at the base of 720 feet. The cascade—the ring of spraying water dispersed by the waterspout—was around 420 feet high.
In a powerful tornadic waterspout, the low pressure central vortex can be strong enough to suck up water and small objects from the body of water below, before depositing them back to earth once the storm loses its energy. And other forms of storm can have the same dramatic effect—an updraft is a wind current caused when warm air rises, or when a region of low pressure at the surface draws in air from the surrounding area, which is forced to rise. During major storms, updrafts can reach speeds in excess of 60 mph—strong enough to lift small organisms into the sky. These phenomena, claimed Dr Gudger, are the source of many of those falling fish.
“One who has witnessed the activities of a whirlwind or who has seen the wreckage left in its path will have no difficulty in believing that such a whirlwind or even the heavy winds accompanying a hard storm could pick up and transport to some distance objects of such light weight as small fishes,” he wrote to Science, responding to Bergen Evans.
Dr Gudger had witnessed many a large waterspout. “Such a waterspout might pick up fish,” he wrote. “Everything moveable would be sucked up in the whirling vortex. Furthermore, whirlwinds originating inland will not only progress overland, picking up various objects, but over ponds and lakes, becoming waterspouts. As such they will there pick up frogs, fresh-water fishes, snails etc and carry these away over the land. Sometimes the fishes are found in a long, narrow, fairly straight row over some distance, evidently having been dropped as the waterspout progressed over the country with lessening speed and carrying power.” Certainly the long trail of fish reported by Dr Bajkov would fit this pattern. Dr Bajkov also reported that the day before the Marksville bass deluge he had spotted numerous small vortices—known as dust devils—in the vicinity, so the conditions needed for a waterspout to form may well have been present.
After The Times reported on the Trowbridge frogs in 1939, its letters page hosted a scrap between believers, non-believers and complete cranks —one, Harry Price of the Council for Psychical Investigation, saw clear evidence of “teleportation”; but the final word went to General Sir Henry de Beauvoir de Lisle, of Hertford Street, W1: “I notice that recent writers on this subject ridicule the idea of frogs falling to the earth from the clouds,” boomed this decorated veteran of Gallipoli and The Somme. “In India in 1908, when quartered at Lucknow, after a heavy shower I noticed my green lawn covered with small fish, an inch to an inch and a half long, and two or three to the square yard; some were alive. The only explanation possible was that these had fallen from the clouds. To verify this I mounted to the flat lead roof of the bungalow, and, as I expected, found the fish there as well, but all were dead from striking the hard roof. At the time this phenomenon was explained by a man of science as due to a whirlwind carrying the water from the sea up to the clouds, as is sometimes seen by a waterspout. If fish can fall from the clouds, why not frogs?”
Ought the word of a grand military man with a name so long it requires Doric columns to support its weight, writing to the editor of the Thunderer, even begin to be questioned? Heavens, no.
Fish rain. Case closed.
From The Weather, issue 6
