The rain of animals

Nonetheless, it happens – albeit rarely. Fish, frogs and birds

are the most common forms of animal rain. Sometimes the creatures land relatively unscathed but in others they are frozen or shredded to pieces. Sometimes the animals survive the fall, suggesting the animals are dropped shortly after extraction. Several witnesses of raining frogs describe the animals as startled but healthy, and exhibiting relatively normal behavior shortly after the event.

fall from the sky. One hypothesis is that tornadic waterspouts

sometimes pick up creatures such as fish or frogs, and carry them for up to several miles.

when during three days of torrential rain numerous fish were

found in puddles

the sky in a series of episodes in a number

of cities in the region since the start of the month. In one incident, a 55-year-old man who was caught in a tadpole downpour described hearing a strange sound in the parking lot of a civic centre in the city of Nanao. Upon further exploration, he found more than 100 dead tadpoles covering the windshields of cars in an area measuring 10 square meters. Dead tadpole downpours were also reported by local officials 48 hours later in the city of Hakusan in the same prefecture.

Southern Tablelands region Australia, blanketing the countryside with their webs.

"They fly through the sky and then we see these falls of spiderwebs that look almost as if it's snowing," local resident Keith Basterfield told the Goulburn Post. A one group of people were hiking the San Bernardo Mountain in Argentina when they noticed the ground was absolutely blanketed with arachnids. That’s when they looked up and realized the creepy crawlies were actually falling from the sky

and dogs", used to describe an especially heavy rain, is

of unknown etymology, and is not necessarily related to the "raining animals" phenomenon. The phrase was used at least since the 17th century

to fall from the sky?
In a cool bit of

historical trivia, the first scientist to really seriously attempt to figure out what was going with these stories of raining animals was the French physicist André-Marie Ampère. Still, when Ampère wasn't discovering electromagnetism and lending his name to the unit of electric current, he offered the first hypothesis of raining animals. Under this theory, waterspouts or tornados lift animal into air and carry them over large distances. The winds are capable of carrying the animals over a relatively wide area and allow them to fall in a concentrated fashion in a localized area