If the wind can lift two beefy Texans and an Indian cow into the air, fish and frogs must present no problem, and many fish- and frog-falls do turn out, on close investigation, to occur at times when unusual winds are recorded. This is certainly true in the case of the Marksville fish-fall. We know this because, by a remarkable coincidence, one of the first people to reach the fish-strewn streets of the town was a biologist working for the US Department of Wild Life and Fisheries.
A.D. Bajkov and his wife had been having breakfast in a restaurant when a bemused waitress told them that fish were raining down outside. The Bajkovs rushed to the sidewalk, their food forgotten, and at once set about identifying the airborne shoal.
They were freshwater fish native to local waters’, Bajkov later reported in a letter to the American journal, Science. He found large-mouth black bass, goggle-eyes, two species of sunfish, hickory shad, and several kinds of minnows. There were more shad than anything else. Bajkov collected a jarful of prize specimens for distribution to museums. Like a good scientist, he also took careful note of the weather conditions.
The actual falling of the fish occurred in somewhat short intervals, during foggy and comparatively calm weather. The velocity of the wind on the ground did not exceed eight miles per hour. The New Orleans weather bureau had no report of any large tornado, or updrift, in the vicinity of Marksville at that time. However, James Nelson Gowanloch, chief biologist for the Louisiana Department of Wild Life and Fisheries, and I had noticed the presence of numerous small tornadoes, or ‘devil dusters’ the day before the ‘rain of fish’ in Marksville.
A more obvious connection between a fall and unusual weather conditions was noted in a letter sent to the East Anglian Magazine in 1958. The writer, H. Bye, had overheard a conversation between an old farmhand and a group of workers. The farmhand was telling them ‘that at West Row and Isleham, on the Cambridge/Suffolk border, when he was a young man, a waterspout was seen over the River Lark. Some hours afterwards there was a heavy thunderstorm and it rained frogs.’
A waterspout also blew up near the site of another English frog-fall in 1892, according to Symons’s Monthly Meteorological Magazine:
During the storm that raged with considerable fury in Birmingham on Wednesday morning, June 30, a shower of frogs fell in the suburb of Moseley. They were found scattered about several gardens. Almost white in colour, they had evidently been absorbed in a small waterspout that was driven over Birmingham by the tempest.
In 1982 Michael W. Rowe, writing in the Journal of Meteorology, revealed that he had discovered a graphic account of fish cascading from a waterspout. It occurs in a book called The Excitement, published in 1830. According to the story, some travellers were sailing through the Strait of Malacca in about 1760, when:
They were surrounded with waterspouts, one of which was very near, and they fired to disperse it. The roaring was tremendous, and presently a torrent of water poured on the ship, which brought down with it many fish and weeds; yet the water was perfectly fresh; a phenomenon singularly curious.
Fish have actually been seen inside or emerging from waterspouts and whirlwinds. E.W. Gudger of the American Museum of Natural History, an avid collector of reports of mysterious showers, was told by his friend, E.A. Mcllhenny of Avery Island, Louisiana, of ‘a small waterspout on a fresh-water distributary in the Mississippi delta, which broke just in front of his fishing boats and then filled boats with water and fishes’.
Michael Rowe also dug out this tiny paragraph from The Times of 23 January 1936: ‘Violent whirlwinds accompanied a storm which broke over Florence on Monday, and among various objects which were seen spinning in the air were some big fish which had evidently been drawn from the River Arno.’ Rowe collects reports of whirlwinds and often writes to local papers appealing for information. A letter in the Manchester Evening News brought this response from E. Singleton, who reported seeing fish and frogs actually ‘taking off’ at Newton-le-Willows, Lancashire, in 1947:
I saw flocks of birds suddenly appear from behind me. Looking back, the reason was obvious, for approaching rapidly was a whirlwind which was carrying all sorts of debris. I threw my two children to the floor and lay on top of them while the wind passed by about 30 yards away. It travelled directly over a huge pond which was locally known as Thompson’s Pit. Half the water together with fish, frogs and weed was carried away and was found deposited on house tops half-a-mile away.
Sometimes, ponds, lakes and rivers are completely emptied of water by the wind. Snowden D. Flora, in Tornadoes of the United States, notes an example: ‘When the destructive tornado of June 23, 1944, passed over West Fork River, West Virginia, the water was actually sucked up and the river left dry, momentarily, at the place where the storm crossed it.’
Another collector of meteorological curiosities, Waldo L. McAtee of the US Biological Survey, told the Biological Society of Washington of two similar ‘lift-offs’. The first was at Christiansoe on the island of Bornholm, Denmark, where ‘a waterspout emptied the harbor to such an extent that the greater part of the bottom was uncovered’. The other took place at a town in France. There had been a violent storm overnight: ‘When morning dawned, the streets were found strewed with fish of various sizes. The mystery was soon solved, for a fish pond in the vicinity had been blown dry and only the large fish left behind.’
Yet even though freak winds are almost certainly the cause of these exotic rains of fish and frogs, the scientists have not yet found all the answers. For example, who could have blamed Major J. Hedgepath, US Army (retired), for being totally baffled by a discovery he made while stationed on the island of Guam in September 1936? He told the readers of Science: ‘I witnessed a brief rainfall of fish, one of the specimens of which was identified as the tench (Tinea tinea) which, to my knowledge, is common only to the fresh waters of Europe. The presence of this species at a locale so remote from its normal habitat is worthy of note.’
Indeed it is. Guam is the largest of the Mariana Islands. It lies in the Western Pacific.
The Jelly Meteors
What is gelatinous, smelly and said to fall from shooting stars? The answer is Pwdre Ser (Welsh for ‘star rot’), a strange jelly-like substance which, eyewitnesses have reported, rains down from the sky.
In 1978 Mrs M. Ephgrave of Cambridge told a television weatherman about a mysterious substance which had landed on her lawn during a heavy rainstorm: ‘It glided down, [it was] about the size of a football and settled like a jelly.’ Other reports from earlier times describe a ’round patch as broad as a bushel, which looked thick, slimy and black’ seen on Dartmoor in 1638; a ‘gelatinous mass of a greyish colour so viscid as to “tremble all over” when poked with a stick’ that hit Koblenz in 1844; and a ‘body of fetid jelly, 4 feet in diameter’ found by villagers from Loweville, New York, in 1846.
So what is Pwdre Ser? Sadly, not ‘star slime’, the last vestige of a shooting star, despite Sir Walter Scott’s assertion, ‘Seek a fallen star and though shalt only light on some foul jelly.’ There are probably several more mundane explanations. Some examples – if the jelly was not actually seen falling – may be colonies of blue-green algae, known as Nostoc commune, a fungus called Tremella mesenterica, or even leftovers from the innards of frogs and toads devoured by birds.
Few samples have been analysed by scientists. The Cambridge jelly, for example, apparently disappeared overnight, but more than two centuries earlier, in 1712, the Reverend John Morton of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, boiled some Pwdre Ser and found it contained fragments of animal bones and skin. He also added two valuable observations: that he had seen a wounded gull vomit a jelly-like substance which turned out to be a ball of half-digested earthworms; and that a friend, Sir William Craven, had watched a bittern do the same thing.
In 1980 Dr G.T. Meaden, Editor of the Journal of Meteorology, seized a rare opportunity and sent a small sample from a blob of colourless jelly found in the garden of Mr Philip Buller at Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, for analysis. The scientist, Mr T.J. Turvey, had only about 1 dessertspoon (10 ml) of the stuff to work on, but he was still able to isolate all kinds of material in it, including plant debris, freshwater algae, roundworms and bacteria. His conclusion: that it was material which a creature normally found near fresh water, such as a heron, might first have swallowed and then regurgitated.