A teeny-tiny baby “bird fart” tornado touched down in Washington state Wednesday, and the video of it is absolutely adorable.
Blink and you’ll miss the baby “bird fart” tornado video shared online by AccuWeather. The small system appeared briefly over the roof of a neighborhood home in the town of La Center in Washington state, ripping a handful of shingles off one roof before disappearing back into a larger storm system.
“I was looking out the window and I saw this really ominous cloud. I was like wow. I saw it had a little finger coming down and I was like that looks like it might be a tornado,” Nathan Bruce, who captured the video, told KOIN.
It’s not exactly clear what a “bird fart” tornado is. An old post on Stormtrack suggests a “bird fart” storm is a “30 minute garden variety thunderstorm” that storm chasers aren’t really interested in. Using this logic, a “bird fart” tornado is probably a similarly weak system.
🐦🌪 Bird fart tornado in Washington yesterday! The NWS gave the tornado a preliminary rating of EF-0. pic.twitter.com/Z6lcWnm5bX
— AccuWeather (@accuweather) October 12, 2023
Bruce and his family have lived in La Center for a few years, but this is the first time they’ve ever seen anything like this in their area. “Then it started coming in this direction and then I noticed the debris coming up and I saw some shingles coming off the roof of an adjacent house,” Bruce continued.
Thankfully there was no major damage, just a few trash cans knocked over. But Bruce said there was no alert or warning despite the apparently perfect environment for a tornado to appear. (RELATED: If You Think Close-Up Tornado Videos Are Scary, Wait Till You See What Else Is Coming…)
“I knew there was some potential for some thunderstorms this afternoon but I didn’t see any indication of tornados or warnings or anything in advance,” he concluded. “There’s only been a few in the last 10 years so it seems like a pretty rare thing and I was glad I was able to get it on video.”
The National Weather Service ranked the very brief tornado as an EF-0, the lowest on the scale.