During a hailstorm in Calgary in 2015, a man ran out into the street while ice was still pounding the pavement. Moments later he was back indoors, holding a pigeon he had carried in out of the storm. A three-photo sequence of the rescue, shared on Imgur, became one of the small feel-good stories of 2015.
The pigeon rescue in three photos
The first photo shows the scale of the storm: a city street turned white with hail between the buildings. In the second, taken through a rain-streaked window, a distant figure is out in the middle of it. The third brings the reason into focus. A man in a yellow shirt stands indoors by the window, cradling the pigeon he brought in from the hail.
Why Calgary gets so much hail
Calgary sits in the middle of Alberta's "Hailstorm Alley", a belt running from High River north through Calgary and Red Deer towards Lacombe and west to Rocky Mountain House. It is considered one of the worst places in the world for damaging hail, and Calgary is often called the hailstorm capital of Canada. Damaging storms strike somewhere in central and southern Alberta every summer, mostly between May and August.
Some of those storms rank among Canada's costliest natural disasters:
- 1991: about $342 million in damage, a Canadian record at the time.
- 12 July 2010: 4 cm hailstones and about $400 million in damage.
- 13 June 2020: hail and flash flooding across Calgary and Airdrie, with damage estimated at $1.2–1.5 billion.
- 5 August 2024: about $2.8 billion in damage, Canada's second-costliest disaster.
Since 1996, insurers have funded the Alberta Hail Suppression Project, which uses cloud seeding to try to make hailstorms less severe. Its effect has never been proven statistically.
How hail forms and how fast it falls
Hail grows inside strong thunderstorms. Powerful updrafts carry water droplets high into the cloud, where they freeze. The frozen pellets fall, collect more supercooled water, and get swept back up again. Each trip adds a layer, clear where liquid droplets are plentiful and milky white where they are scarce. A stone can stay aloft for 30 minutes or more until it is too heavy for the updraft to hold.
Hailstones usually measure from 5 mm to 15 cm across. A 1 cm stone hits the ground at about 9 m/s (20 mph), while an 8 cm stone can reach about 48 m/s (110 mph). Canada issues severe thunderstorm warnings for hail of 2 cm or larger, the size usually considered damaging.
Hail safety for people and pets
The US National Weather Service advises the same steps that apply in Calgary: watch for severe thunderstorm warnings, bring pets inside and move cars under cover before the storm arrives, and avoid driving through it. When the storm hits, wait it out in an interior room away from windows. Once the hail has passed, check on any animals caught outside.
More animal rescues: the Coast Guard’s Lake St. Clair dog story, the Pointe-Verte deer rescue in New Brunswick, A Coast Guard Rescue of a Labrador from Icy Michigan Water, Conservation Officers Rescue a Deer from Duck Lake Near Kelowna and A Duck Rescue at a Frozen Pond in Norway. For a storm story with a sadder ending, read about Jonathan Hardman and his dog Rambo.
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