LONG BEACH >> Bixby Park is a quiet place in the hours before dawn.

In fact, it’s a quiet enough place for people to sleep. Quiet enough for a couple to sleep on playground equipment. Or another man to sleep on an outdoor stage. And another in a car.

Such were the places that a team of volunteers found some of Long Beach’s homeless during a citywide census of the homeless early Thursday morning. The volunteers arrived at Bixby Park before 6 a.m., before sunrise and before the sounds of commuters’ cars moving along Ocean Boulevard filled the cool seaside air. Volunteers gathered near intersection of Broadway and Junipero Avenue to review their strategy and begin to canvas of the park and surrounding neighborhoods.

The volunteers encountered Eric Bolland, found sleeping on the park’s band shell, seconds after beginning their walk in Bixby Park. Bolland was willing to talk to the volunteers but was initially wary of a reporter and photographer he saw accompanying the team.

“I don’t think anybody here wants their picture in the newspaper,” Bolland said before stepping away from the stage to speak privately with the volunteers.

The six volunteers and team leader Megan Robertson, a homeless services coordinator, took Bolland aside to ask him a few questions. The volunteers didn’t actually need to collect his official name but wanted to know the circumstances of his and others’ homelessness. How long have they been homeless? Do they have mental health issues? Addictions?

• VIDEO: A former homeless man helps count the currently homeless.

• PHOTOS: Volunteers count Long Beach’s homeless

These and other questions are asked during the survey, which Long Beach officials conduct every two years. The census is intended to provide an accurate picture of homelessness within Long Beach and to point individuals to service providers who may be able to improve their conditions, Robertson said.

In 2013, volunteers found 4,387 homeless people in the city. Numbers from Thursday’s count were not immediately available.

Elsa Ramos, coordinator at Long Beach’s Multi-Service Center and one of the lead organizers of the project, said it will take a couple months to tabulate the results.

More than 300 volunteers participated, she said.

“We were canvassing the entire city and we got everybody back safe,” she said.

Moments after speaking with the volunteers, Bolland, 38, chose to open up about his own situation. He said he has been homeless by choice since 2012 and that he prefers life of daily meditation over work or other facets of a traditional lifestyle.

“I consider myself a full-time spiritualist,” he said. “As far as my beliefs, this is the path I like to walk.”

Bolland said he has worked in the fast-food and grocery industries but found employment more limiting than incarceration. He said he has served time after convictions for possession of marijuana for sale and attempted second-degree commercial burglary, although he feels the latter conviction was the result of authorities’ disdain for his nonconformist tendencies.

He also believes police unduly hassle the homeless population around Bixby Park.

“It’s pretty much a full-time assault on the homeless. Right now, most people out here have mental illness,” he said.

After speaking with Bolland, volunteers continued to make their way through the park and beyond. They interviewed a man and woman who had been sleeping near a playground slide and another man who had just awoken after sleeping in a car near the park.

Not everyone was willing to talk, let alone confirm whether they were homeless.

“You’re assuming,” one man seated at one of the park’s tables called out in a sharp tone of voice. “Just enjoy your day.”

After the sun rose, the original team of Bixby Park volunteers were joined by Dimirez Williams, a formerly homeless man who now has an apartment in downtown Long Beach where he has lived for about four months.

Williams, 22, said Robertson’s work had been critical in helping him to quit smoking and drinking and improve his circumstances.

“I was one of these people on the streets who had no direction, and then I happened to run into this program called the TIP program. I met my mentor, her name is Megan (Robertson). She actually helped me a lot; she took me off the streets, put my mind in the right place,” he said.

Robertson works for Mental Health America of Los Angeles and the TIP program Williams referred to refers to the organization’s Transition in Place program. Robertson said she found others at the park who may benefit from the program, which involves case management aimed at helping clients obtain employment, lessons in self-sufficiency and therapy, if needed.

“Two of the people we talked to were young adults, and I run a housing program for young adults,” she said.

Finding such people during the count enables her to reach out and say, “Hey, come and see me.”