A plague of frogs?

I obviously missed it at the time, but back in the innocent days of June 2005, a rather bizarre event occurred in the small town of Odžaci in northern Serbia, when storm clouds gathered and thousands of frogs rained down total the ground.

Traffic ground to a standstill and the locals ran for cover as "countless" frogs fell from the air with the rain. The frogs, described as different from the frogs usually seen in the area, seemed to survive the fall, and just hopped away, to everyone's surprise.

This is an unusual, but not unique, occurrence. A downpour of frogs has been reported in Tournai, Belgium in 1625, in Lille, France in 1794, in Kansas City, USA in 1873. Pink frogs were reported to have rained on two towns in Gloucestershire, UK as recently as 1987. 

And frogs are not the only animals to fall from the sky: the small town of Yoro, Honduras celebrates an annual Festival de la Lluvia de Peces (Festival of the Fish Rain), when a rain of small silvery fish falls once or twice a year. If it's happening, I guess you may as well celebrate it!

This is not quite the Biblical plague of frogs described in Exodus 8 verses 1-15. That was actually a much less impressive event, where an unspecified number of frogs ("abundant", millions?) came out of the river (the Nile?) and "covered the land of Egypt", getting "into the houses of your servants, onto your people, into your ovens, and into your kneading bowls". No, not the kneading bowls! Deprived of water, the frogs eventually began to die off, causing a "great stench".

This must have been concerning, but the divine threat "I will smite all your territory with frogs" was perhaps not one of the Lord's most chilling. Certainly, it didn't change Pharaoh's mind on the captivity of the Israelites, because God tried eight other plagues after the frogs.

There is of course a perfectly good explanation for all these miracles, and it doesn't involve God or smiting. Regarding the rain of frogs, there is a freak meteorological event called a waterspout, where a small tornado forms over water, sucking up any lightweight objects into its extremely low-pressure centre. When the tornado loses energy and dissipates, it rains its contents to the ground wherever it happens to be. Some waterspouts can travel hundreds of kilometers, but usually they only travel a few kilometers from their source. 

The Biblical plague of frogs can have many natural explanations (as do the other plagues and miraculous events mentioned in the Bible), from a regular migration to a one-off stress reaction caused by water pollution or algae blooms or bacterial or viral agents or increased water temperatures or drying up of parts of the river due to short-term climate events or Super El Niño years.

Weird things happen in nature. You can understand that ancient religious leaders (the politicians of their day) might have been tempted to use them for their own advantage, much like even more ancient leaders used knowledge of astronomical events, extreme weather, etc, to bamboozle and control their naïve citizens.