On Jan. 2, a massive flock of hundreds of birds decided to touch down in the middle of a parking lot in Cypress, Texas. The incident, caught on camera by Yvone Gomez, was described as “straight out of a Hitchcock movie.”
“These birds were not scared as I honked,” Gomez told Storyful.
In Gomez’s video — a scene that looks like a modern adaptation of Alfred Hitchcock‘s 1963 horror classic The Birds — hundreds of dark-colored birds monopolize the shopping center lot in Cypress. The clip shows birds sitting atop cars, above shopping cart holders, inside truck beds, and — perhaps most obstructively — in the middle of the lot itself, preventing cars from moving easily and from shoppers from reaching stories like Ross, Home Goods, and Marshalls. The birds cover a tree in one frame with a few fliers on each branch.
Gomez told Storyful that the birds refused to move for anyone or anything — staying still when cars honked at them and even doing the same when a child screamed at them, too.
The birds were great-tailed grackles, a species common during all seasons in areas of the southern U.S., according to the Houston Audubon.
“Great-tailed grackles are a permanent sight in Houston and can be found in any area inhabited by humans that has some trees,” per environmental educator Vicki Stittleburg on Houston Audubon’s website.