VIDEO: Salmon Cross Flooded Road for Amazing Reason

If you were walking down the road and trying to make your way without getting wet when there is a flood, you would probably never imagine seeing fish crossing the road.

Well, they might not be chickens but they have a reason to cross the road.

Sure, we can make tons of jokes with this, but the fishes really had a good reason to cross the road and that’s to finish their life cycle and go through all the phases.

According to nationalgeographic.com, once a year, chum salmon can be seen swimming furiously across flooded roads along western Washington State’s Skokomish River.

“When we get good fall rain this river overflows its banks … right around this time,” says Aaron Dufault, a salmon policy analyst at the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.

“It’s always kind of a shock to see a nine- or 10-pound salmon crossing the road,” Dufault adds.

The natural occurrence coincides with chum salmon spawning season.

While the excess water pools up in puddles on roads or in fields, the salmon often follow the flow, taking them out of the river’s main channel.

“Likely they are in the process of trying to find a mate and a good spot, and their spawning isn’t successful unless they are able to make it back to the main stem of the river or some side channels,” Dufault says.

Despite occasionally losing their way, the fall chum salmon population is doing great, Dufault says.

The salmon typically begin appearing inland in November, after a journey across the open ocean.

When chum hatch from their eggs, they emerge from the gravel and swim straight out to estuaries, unlike most species of salmon. Other species remain in freshwater for anywhere from three to five years while they put on size.

Additionally, the salmon-crossing-the-road situation is rarely seen with species other than chum, probably because of the timing of the runs, Dufault says.

“It’s pretty impressive how adept they are at swimming with half their body out of the water,” he says. “Their drive to go spawn will take them over some pretty dicey spots and drives them forward.”

According to huffingtopost.com, the sight of salmon crossing a flooded road near Union, Wash., is not unusual in the pacific northwest community located about 40 miles southwest of Seattle.

Heavy rains in the nearby Olympic Mountains cause the Skokomish River to flood leading to the phenomenon.

Bears fishing for migrating salmon make for dramatic images, but the shallow water of this road-turned-stream invites other predators.

Although Pacific salmon travel under a range of local names, all, with the exception of steelhead, follow the same life cycle:

They hatch in rivers, travel to the sea, fatten on rich ocean fare, return at maturity to spawn in their natal rivers, and die shortly after spawning.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, salmon stocks throughout the Northwest are at a fraction of their historic levels, a decline caused by overfishing and a loss of freshwater habitat.