A slew of anchovies are turning up on sidewalks, streets, and trails around San Francisco this week. While "fish falls" are usually the result of waterspouts that pick them up from nearby bodies of water and drop them them elsewhere, but in this case, seagulls and pelicans are to blame. Apparently an explosion of the anchovy population in the San Francisco Bay has resulted in a massive feast for the sea birds. Sometimes, they collect more fish than they can carry and drop them as they fly over land. From SFGate:
Reddit user sanfrannie posted earlier this month that about a dozen 8-inch silver fish "rained down from the sky" onto their friend's roof and back deck in the Outer Richmond. Several other users commented with similar experiences — one person said they "heard a whoosh sound behind me and heard a massive splat" before seeing fish scattered on a nearby driveway. Another commented that they "almost got hit by a fish waiting for a bus" in the Castro, and a third person said they assumed "a band of roving kids were doing a Tik Tok sardine-throwing challenge on a roof somewhere" after seeing several fish fall onto an Outer Richmond sidewalk[…]
"From Half Moon Bay to Point Reyes, people are telling me they've never seen bait this thick," said Larry Collins, president of the San Francisco Community Fishing Association. "I heard stories just last week from guys who said that the water out there was just covered with thousands of birds, and the birds were just sitting on the water with anchovies in their mouths because they can't eat anymore."
Of course, fish falls were a favorite topic in the books of Charles Fort (1874-1932), "collector" of anomalous phenomena who greatly influenced my own appreciation for high weirdness.
