KANAZAWA - Tadpoles and small fish have fallen from the sky across several cities in Ishikawa Prefecture recently, leaving local residents in the dark as to the cause of the phenomenon.

Some people said the fallen objects might have come from the beaks of flying birds, while others surmised that a gust of wind might have swirled them up together with water. However, the actual reason behind the phenomenon remains unknown, leaving citizens of the prefecture looking up and wondering what might fall from the sky next.

On the evening of June 4, a man noticed the sound of something plopping onto the ground at a parking lot of the Nakajima citizens center in Nanao. When he looked back, he saw tadpoles scattered upon a car and on the ground.

According to Kiwamu Funakura, 36, an official at the center who went to the parking lot at the time, about 100 tadpoles, each two or three centimeters long, were found to have been scattered around an area measuring about 200 square meters. While it was a rainy day, Funakura said it never occurred to him that the tadpoles had fallen from the sky. Also in the city, Takeshi Kakiuchi, 62, a member of the Nanao Municipal Assembly, found six tadpoles on his car and on the ground around his house, located four kilometers from the center's parking lot, Monday morning.

In Hakusan, about 70 kilometers southwest of Nanao, between 20 to 30 dead tadpoles were found on a car windshield and other places in a parking lot Saturday morning, with some reportedly having lost their original shape.

Meanwhile, Yukio Oumi, 78, found small dead fish around his house in Nakanotomachi. On Tuesday evening, he found 13 fish, apparently crucian carp each three centimeters long, on the back of his truck and the ground.

According to the Kanazawa Local Meteorological Observatory, it has no information that any whirlwinds occurred on the days when the tadpoles and small fish were found. "Birds such as herons or umineko [black-tailed gulls] that had these tadpoles in their mouths or gorges might have dropped them because they were startled by something while flying," said Kimimasa Tokikuni, the head of the Ishikawa prefectural branch of the Japanese Society for Preservation of Birds.

All the locations where tadpoles and small fish were found are located near rice paddies in which tadpoles live. So, it is possible that gray herons and other waterfowl, which are in the middle of their breeding periods, tried to take them as food for young birds, according to Tokikuni.

"Small-scale wind gusts, which couldn't be observed by the meteorological observatory, might have occurred in limited areas and such winds might have swirled up water and the tadpoles at the same time," said Susumu Aiba, professor at the Kanazawa Institute of Technology.