Swallow-Watching: a Tale of Tails

Today, as in the years past, thousands of visitors from out of town will pack the streets of San Juan Capistrano and the serene Mission grounds around the ruins of the old church to celebrate the return of the swallows.

March 19 is the traditional date for welcoming the little birds back from their winter home in South America. They’ll nest and breed here, and return south in October.

So today, there will be a lot of neck-craning, outstretched arms and fingers pointing skyward, and shouts of “There’s one now!”

As in other years, however, most of the little flurries of excitement will be misdirected. With rare exceptions, the visitors will be mistaking sparrows, linnets and even pigeons for swallows. It won’t be entirely the fault of bird watchers because, inadvertently but subtly, they have been misled for decades.

Dozens of businesses in town--restaurants, cleaners, novelty shops, bars--use paintings or sketches of swallows to decorate walls and signs.

The problem is, it seems impossible to find one of these signs that depicts a cliff swallow, which has a short, square tail and happens to be the kind of swallow that comes back to Capistrano each spring.

Barn Swallows Pictured

The pictures show, clearly and in detail, barn swallows, the kind with long, gracefully forked tails. Nowadays, some merchants and city officials, such as senior administrative assistant and historian Pamela Gibson, admit it was all a mistake.

When Sue DiMaio 40 years ago opened the Capistrano Trading Post, at Camino Capistrano and Ortega Highway, just across from the Mission, she put up a large signboard to welcome visitors.

“We looked in books, and the only picture of a swallow we could find was one with a forked tail,” she said. “So we painted them that way on the sign. Later, we found out that was wrong, so we ‘de-forked’ them for a while, but they just weren’t quite as interesting, so we made them forked again, but not quite as long as before.

“In the store, we do have oversized picture postcards of real barn swallows.”

The old and famous El Adobe Inn has a forked-tail swallow on its sign. So do the Swallows Inn Bar, the Galleria Capistrano of American Indian Art and a French restaurant called L’Hirondelle (The Swallow).

Pageant and Parade

The throngs of visitors who will come to San Juan Capistrano today for the annual Mission pageant (complete with mariachi music and Indian and Mexican dances, and attended by Rafael Rene, son of Leon Rene, who wrote the song “When the Swallows Come Back to Capistrano”), may not get a glimpse of a live swallow, but they’ll see many signs on stores and businesses, all depicting birds with forked tails.

So will the thousands of others who attend the annual Fiesta de Las Golondrinas parade, which starts at 11 a.m. Saturday.

To the amateur observer, the principal difference between cliff and barn swallows is the shape of the tail. Both are five to six inches long, and both have tapered wings and very small beaks that open wide to capture insects in the air.

Kara McLeod, 18, of Laguna Niguel, does research for her mother, Linda Blaha, a licensed rehabilitator of wild birds. She said the number of swallows returning to Capistrano has dwindled in recent years, with commercial and residential development.

“But there are a lot of them in Orange County, especially around Irvine and Mission Viejo,” she said. “And they don’t all come back at once on March 19. They just sort of drift in, building their mud nests under bridges and eaves.”

Richard F. Landy, Capistrano’s director of tourism, said about a dozen swallows were seen last week in the ruins of the Old Mission.

He agreed that March 19 is not a special date for the birds’ return. It is St. Joseph’s Day, a traditional time for marking the birds’ arrival.

As for the misleading pictures of forked-tailed birds around town, Landy said he had no idea how the mix-up got started, except that “people just think of swallows that way.”

And if a visitor is sharp-eyed enough, he or she will see some signs put up by the city along a bike trail in a small park near the Mission. They bear silhouettes of swallows with square tails.

“Someone on the city staff did some research,” said Gibson, the senior administrative assistant.

“But then,” she added with a little grimace, “the official city seal, made in 1961 when we incorporated, has a tiny swallow on it--with a forked tail.”