A junior doctor has ended up with a new pet after a goldfish mysteriously appeared in his garden.

Dr Ben Beska, 33, from Newcastle, said he saw a group of magpies squawking in his garden on Saturday and went out to investigate when he spotted the fish lying in the grass.

The NHS cardiology doctor retrieved the fish and placed it in a freezer drawer filled with water, and intends to keep it as a pet.

“It’s pretty mad really, finding a fish on the lawn. I have no idea how it got in the garden,” Dr Beska said.

The fish has now been named Alice after a text message he sent to a friend regarding the animal autocorrected from “it’s alive” to “it’s alice”.

Dr Beska said that once he spotted the fish moving on the grass he “couldn’t just leave it”.

He said he picked up the “flapping” fish and found an old freezer drawer which he filled with water.

“It started to swim around so it was alive,” he said.

“I locked my cats out of the kitchen, obviously, I didn’t want them to eat it, that would have been a terrible end to the story,” Dr Beska added.

He went to a nearby shop and purchased a tank and some chemicals, adding: “I think it was seconds from death so it’s a lucky fish.”

Dr Beska suspected a bird had picked up the fish from a nearby pond and dropped it while carrying it away.

However, he said, there were no ponds close by and he thought it must therefore have travelled a “reasonable distance”.

The mystery of the goldfish has gone viral on X, formerly Twitter, with Dr Beska’s initial post about it gaining more than 16 million views which he said was “bonkers”.

He said: “It’s very odd, I mainly use [X] for medical stuff, so this is very, very different.

“It’s been quite funny, some of the comments are quite funny and about 1,000 people said they thought a bird dropped it.”

One X user has even created a separate account for the fish, with the username alicebeska.

One post on the account for the fish reads: “Such a wild day, booked one of those journeetrips and wound up in some northerner’s lawn? I would like a refund please.”

Dr Beska now intends to keep the fish as a pet, with plans to purchase a larger tank and possibly another fish to keep it company.