On Friday morning of the week before last, early risers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, witnessed a peculiar sight in the shape of a shower of birds that fell from a clear sky, literally cluttering the streets of the city. There were wild ducks, catbirds, woodpeckers, and many birds of strange plumage, some of them resembling canaries, but all dead, falling in heaps along the thoroughfares, the singular phenomenon attracting many spectators and causing much comment.

The most plausible theory as to the strange windfall is that the birds were driven inland by the late storm on the Florida coast, the force of the current of air and the sudden change of temperature causing the death of many of the little feathered creatures when they reached Baton Rouge. Some idea of the extent of the shower may be gathered from the estimate that out on National Avenue alone the children of the neighborhood collected as many as 200 birds.

— St. Louis newspaper, quoted in The Osprey, December 1896