Acceptance of a freakish gift of nature shouldn’t be grounds for a civil penalty, much less a jail stint. Yet that’s what happened June 12 in Point Clear, Alabama, when over-officious game wardens began ticketing people for scooping up seafood from a “jubilee.”

The eastern shore of Mobile Bay is the only place in the Western Hemisphere blessed with the jubilee, which, as defined by Mobile’s Lagniappe weekly, “is a rare, spontaneous natural phenomenon enjoyed on Alabama’s Gulf Coast where droves of fish, crabs, eels and shrimp converge to the shoreline as water oxygen levels plummet.” Caused by a combination of certain tidal conditions and light breezes from the East, full jubilees are rare, sometimes a year or two apart. For centuries, area residents up and down a small stretch of shoreline have alerted each other by ringing bells or serial phone calls when jubilees occur.