For a few surreal minutes in June 2005, the residents of a small Serbian town were forced to do a reality check, after storm clouds gathered and frogs rained down from the sky. Thousands of the amphibians are said to have fallen to the ground, forcing traffic to a standstill and locals to run for cover.
One resident of Odžaci in the country’s northwest told the news , “This huge ‘cloud’ seemed to come out of nowhere and its shape and colour looked very strange. We were all wondering what it was when suddenly frogs started to fall from the sky. I thought maybe a plane carrying frogs had exploded in midair.” Another said, “I saw countless frogs fall from the sky.”
Remarkably, the normally altitude-averse creatures survived their ordeal. Despite plummeting from some unspecified height, the bamboozled creatures are said to have hopped off, apparently none the worse for wear.
Although the incident may sound strange, it’s not the first time that amphibians have ‘rained’ from the skies. Historical reports tell of a downpour of frogs that hit Tournai, Belgium in 1625, and a deluge of toads that fell near Lille, France in 1794.
More recently, in 1987, pink frogs are reported to have rained onto two towns in Gloucestershire, England, over a two week period. An unnamed woman told a national newspaper, they were “bouncing off umbrellas and pavements and hopped off in their hundreds to nearby streams and gardens.”
And it’s not just frogs and toads. Other non-flying animals are also said to have fallen as rain, including fish and worms. Notably, in the small town of Yoro, Honduras, locals celebrate the annual Festival de la Lluvia de Peces (Festival of Fish Rain) to commemorate the rain of small, silvery fish that is said to occur there once or twice a year.
Taking these reports at face value, this begs the question. How does it happen? According to the laws of physics, what goes up, must come down. Or in this case, what goes down, must have gone up first.
The most popular explanation is that the animals were caught up in a freak meteorological event. When a small tornado forms over water, it’s called a waterspout. Low pressure inside the tunnel of the waterspout can effectively suck light-weight objects up into it.
Then the twister keeps travelling, taking any small animals with it, until it eventually loses energy and rains its contents to the ground. Some waterspouts can travel for hundreds of miles, but more usually, they crash and burn after much shorter distances, such as a mile or two.
This explains why the only animals that really should fall as rain, don’t. We may say that it sometimes ‘rains like cats and dogs’ but the household pets are thankfully too heavy to become embroiled in a waterspout and whisked into the air.
