During heavy summer storms, central Illinois
has been showered, at least metaphorically, with more than its
share of cats and dogs. But once, in what must have been the most
unusual downpour in this region’s history, it rained so hard
that it rained amphibians — and these creatures weren’t
just figures of speech. The unexpected payload of heavy precipitation
rained down near Taylorville during a late-night storm on June 4,
1869. Steady rains had pummeled the area for several days, and the
saturated ground was spotted with puddles and pools. Residents just
north of Taylorville woke Saturday morning to more than mud and
standing water, though. Springfield’s Illinois State Register reported
that every ditch, brook, puddle, and pool was alive with
nondescript “serpents” in numbers “beyond all
estimate.” “Boys and men take them from the pools
in hundreds, and they are brought to town for inspection,”
according to the report. “It is the universal testimony of
all the people in the country that no creature anything like those
was ever before seen by them.” The dark-hued creatures were depicted as 18
to 24 inches long and three-fourths of an inch to an inch in
diameter. They possessed a flattened tail, no fins, an eel-like
head with a suckerlike mouth, small eyes, and, most strangely, a
single pair of perfectly formed appendages — similar to those
of a turtle — immediately behind the head. We recently asked local biologists to help
identify these creatures from these descriptions. After conferring
with peers, Dave Cox, professor of biology at Lincoln Land
Community College, was the first to come up with the identification
that would eventually be a consensus answer for the group: an amphibian known
popularly as a lesser siren. “I can see where a layperson might
consider the forelimbs to be somewhat flipperlike and the mouth,
located on the lower part of the jaw, to be somewhat
suckerlike,” notes Mike Romano of the department of
biological science at Western Illinois University. “The lesser siren is 1 to 2 feet or so
[long] and does have small eyes . . . [but] there did
not seem to be any mention of the external gills, which would be pretty
prominent. Nevertheless, the fact that they could be transported so
easily out of water makes it the most likely candidate.” Cox adds that the lesser siren is common in
the southern states and that Illinois is the northernmost edge of
its range. Even here it is only in the southernmost quarter of this
state that the amphibian is easily found. Side lakes along the
Mississippi River are their favorite habitat. “Sirens are permanently aquatic,
secretive by nature, thus more common that we think,” Cox
says. Even for those totally unfamiliar with this
herpetological oddity, the real stumping question with regard to
this event must be how these relatively large creatures ended up
falling from the sky into the puddles of the prairie north of
Taylorville. As it turns out, though such events are
exceedingly rare, strange objects — biological and otherwise
— have been falling during storms since the beginning of
recorded history. “Occurrences like this have been
documented all over the world,” says WICS (Channel 20)
meteorologist Kevilee Douglas. “They are usually associated
with tornadoes. Tornadoes and waterspouts — tornadoes over
water — act like a vacuum cleaner, sucking almost anything
from the surface high into the atmosphere. Strong thunderstorms
that contain tornadoes have strong updrafts. These updrafts, if
strong enough, can pick up debris at the surface and pull it into
the upper atmosphere. Once this debris is in the higher levels of
the atmosphere, it can get caught up in the jet stream. The debris
will eventually fall to the earth, sometimes hundreds of miles away from where they were
picked up.” Douglas’ scenario would then have these
animals being picked up en masse by a tornado that most likely
waterspouted over a wetland adjacent to southern Illinois’
leg of the Mississippi and then transported to Taylorville after a
one- to two-hour ride on the jet stream. Again, many skeptics would question whether
these animals so few Illinoisans have ever seen truly were of a
sizable enough population density to enable a tornado to lift 1,000
or more of them skyward. Although their label of being rarely seen is
all too accurate, that aspect of the animals’ existence is
deceiving. Philip Smith wrote in his The
Amphibians and Reptiles of Illinois that “if special
effort is made [sirens] can be taken in numbers.” Brian
Anderson, chairman of the Lincoln Land’s biological- and
physical-sciences department, says that as a result of human
encroachment, the species has “likely been under pressure
since the 1960s. Many of its haunts [are now restricted to] state
nature preserves or protected federal properties.” Population
density and magnitude would have been significantly superior in the
mid-19th century. “Sirens can be moderately common in the
appropriate habitat, though they are quite secretive, mostly active
at night, and not often seen,” says Steve Mullin, a
herpetologist at Eastern Illinois University. “I have
encountered healthy populations in southern Illinois and would
guess that you might find densities as high as one individual per cubic meter of
water.” Using Mullin’s estimate and a
hypothetical tornado traveling 30 mph with a contact base 2 meters
across and a 30-second touchdown, mathematics tells us that it
could have vacuumed up almost 1,000 sirens. History has recorded scores of enigmatic
“falls” during storms. These range from the
not-so-strange red sand that fell over Chicago in early January
2006, which the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency determined
to have originated in Texas or Oklahoma, to the more common
“fish falls” that occur just often enough in Europe to
barely merit headlines any more. But it would seem that Taylorville
can claim downstate Illinois’ only mysterious
“fall” in history and the world’s solitary
“siren fall.”
This article appears in Feb 9-15, 2006.
