This is the moment locals laugh and grab themselves a free meal as they stuff fish into a sack that had fallen off the back of a lorry and ended up scattered over hundreds of metres of road.

The footage shows literally hundreds of dead fish lying on the tarmac in the hot sun where laughing motorists are filming, and one of the men is seen grabbing some fish and pushing them into a plastic sack.

The fish were found littering the road and bridge over water in the area of the village of Verkhnekalinovsky in the Kamyzyaksky District which is located in Russia’s Astrakhan Oblast region.

Many online commentators joked about it raining fish but it has since emerged that the fish were being transported on a lorry to a processing factory after being harvested from a pond when the lorry lost its load.

As a result, as it sped down the road, the fish ended up scattered on the tarmac, with apparently the entire load lost before the driver realised.

Local officials said that staff from the fish farm that owned the pond had cleared the road, although many of the fish had already been squashed by passing traffic.

Online commentators joked that the fish were being used to cover the cracks in the road while others asked if the local Orthodox church was proclaiming it a miracle and a gift from heaven.