It rains frogs and iguanas, but never cats and dogs…
It’s often said that certain weird events could only happen in the US state of Florida. Entire Twitter accounts exist that are dedicated to bizarre local news stories from the sunshine state.
“Florida Man Breaks Into Restaurant, Strips Naked, Eats Noodles He Brought From Home and Plays Bongos” ran one headline last year. And that’s a relatively tame one.
But this week saw perhaps the oddest bulletin yet and, pleasingly, in the form of a weather forecast. On Tuesday, Floridians were warned: “Falling Iguanas Possible Tonight”.
The rest of the world had a good laugh – but it really happened. Iguanas, cold-blooded as they are, slow down and become immobile when temperatures dip unseasonably low. Alive but petrified (a little like anyone who comes across them, I imagine), they slip from branches, flopping on to whatever’s below.
Lizard rain. It makes our weather in Britain seem rather unexciting but the phenomenon made me wonder what other creatures have fallen from the sky. Quite a few, it turns out.
We talk of it “raining cats and dogs” only metaphorically – the most common explanation of the phrase is that dead strays used to be shoved into ditches in pre-industrial Britain, so after a heavy downpour they’d be washed up and left all over the roads – but how about frogs, birds, snakes, worms, or even spiders?
There are examples of all of them “raining” down over the years, and some, I’m proud to say, have even fallen in Blighty. In April 1871, The Times reported “a storm of glutinous drops neither jellyfish nor masses of frogspawn” falling in Bath. “Many soon developed into a wormlike chrysalism,” it added. Larvae inexplicably fell again in Bucks 30 years later and, in 2004, dozens of fish were whipped up and deposited on the Shropshire village of Knighton.
So, we may not be in Florida’s league but we, too, have had the odd weird event. Nothing of the sort is forecast for the coming week, though.
Not yet, anyway.