My friend and I went up to the local park shortly before midnight to exercise (running on the ashphalt) (it’s well lit at night). While doing so, we noticed a dozen or so large birds standing around on the grass. They looked something like hawks, were light-colored on the front and dark-colored on the back, were maybe 50% larger than the seagulls we see all the time, and seemed to be wandering around pecking at the grass.
We live in Santa Clara CA, near San Jose.
I would say they were hawks (which one sees around here), but I’ve never heard of hawks standing around pecking at grass, or being in flocks, or being out at night. On the other hand, I don’t really know anything about hawks to begin with.
Anyone have any idea what kind of birds they were? Thanks…
My cats like to go out at night, and stand around in the grass in the back yard. Occasionally they make a great leap onto the grass, and then proceed to bring me a field mouse they have caught. (Bringing this mouse from outside right into my house to proudly show it to me.)
So it appears mice run around in grass in the dark. Hawks hunt mice. So that might be what they are looking for.
That’s because this is about as non-hawk behavior as you can get–hawks are found in flocks during migration, but the other two? No. If you had added, “Sitting on a telephone wire and warbling a long sweet song”, you would have scored a trifecta.
“Goose” sounds good. ( Heh. ) Wandering around grassy municipal parks and pecking at the grass is classic “nuisance goose flock” behavior.
There are others that it could have been, including domestic geese. You could call the Santa Clara Parks Department and ask them what breed their nuisance geese in that particular park are.
It was hard to see them, because it was dark out, but they definitely had a more diagonal hawk-like silhouette than a more rounded duck-like silhouette that those photos of geese have.
Tamerlane’s suggestion of a night heron seems fairly reasonable.
I have never, in all my days as a birdwatcher, heard of an entire flock of black-crowned night herons prowling around on the grass in a city park at midnight. However, there’s a lotta weird stuff that comes out of SoCal that this Midwestern gal finds baffling, so…wouldn’t surprise me much, to find out that’s what they were. The bird count list sez they’re “common; always seen in their habitat in season”, so maybe their habitat down your way happens to be the city park.
The Parks Dept. would certainly know if there was a resident flock of black-crowned night herons down there.
I don’t know if they’d consider themselves a flock, but there are about 6 or 8 night herons that roost in a particular tree near where I live (San Diego).
In Santa Barbara they’d hang out in packs on the estuaries, perching in trees on the shore during the day. I’ve also indeed seen packs of them milling around on the grass at Lake Merritt in Oakland, middle of town, so Santa Clara wouldn’t be a surprise. Fine looking birds.
A couple of Easters ago, I saw a group of several dozen turkey vultures milling around in a schoolyard near here. Aside from one who was picking at a dead squirrel, none of them seemed to have found any carrion. They stayed all afternoon and well into the night, and they were gone the next day.
Being a mild nightowl during my decade+ on graveyard shift, I’ve seen such a few times ( last time was in Alameda on the upper lawn at Crown Memorial Beach, as I recall - maybe two dozen of the buggers - sort of surreal, really ). Don’t know exactly how common it is, but they will do so. Whether they’re hunting worms coming up on moist evenings, other bugs, sleepy gophers or just kvetching, I’ve no idea.
Close, but wrong continent.
