Most common type of animal rain

The most commonly mentioned type of animal in reports of anomalous rain is fish. In his 1946 review of the subject "Rains of Fishes – Myth or Fact?", ichthyologist E W Gudger counted 78 documented rains of fishes throughout history, going back to Ancient Greece. There have been numerous additional cases since then, including at least seven in the last 10 years. GWR's meteorology consultant, Randall Cerveny, has collected hundreds of reports of anomalous rainfalls, that also include frogs, beans, worms, toads, spiders, rice, snails, crayfish, jelly, seeds, sand-eels, snakes, coins, clams and beetles.

The exact mechanism that causes these events isn't definitely proven, but the most commonly accepted explanation is that waterspouts (a weather phenomenon similar to a tornado) pull fish from bodies of water and fling them high into the sky.

An important advance in our understanding of this phenomenon came about in 1947. On the morning of 23 October, marine biologist Alexander Bajkov and his wife Virginia were eating breakfast in a diner in Marksville, Louisiana, USA, when their waitress came over to their table and told them it was raining fish outside.

Bajkov immediately rushed out to document the phenomenon. He estimated that there was a fish for roughly every square yard in an area around 1,000 ft (304.8 m) long and 80 ft (24.4 m) wide. The fish were all recognizable as freshwater species, native to the rivers and bayous of the area (Marksville is located near the confluence of the Atchafalaya, Mississippi and Red Rivers). Most of the fish were large-mouth black bass (micropterus salmoides), goggle-eye (chaenobryttus coronarius), sunfish (lepomis), minnows, and hickory shad (pomolobus medtocris).

Conversations with locals confirmed that there had been numerous small tornadoes and waterspouts sighted in the area over the preceding few days, and it was concluded that the fish must have been carried up into the air by a powerful updraft.