Breaking Tradition : Renegade Swallows Pass Up Capistrano for a Malibu Estate Called Heaven’s Gate

As tradition would have it, thousands of swallows forsake the Argentine winter each year and fly north to nest at the legendary Mission San Juan Capistrano, founded two centuries ago by Father Junipero Serra.

There is a song about it. A weeklong festival. And tourists. Busloads of them.

But for two years now, a renegade flock of swallows--normally sticklers for tradition, ornithologists say--have piloted right past San Juan Capistrano, stretching their 6,000-mile flight to Malibu.

The swallow pioneers have chosen to spend their time north at Steve and Pam Malin’s $3-million French chateau perched high above the Pacific Ocean on a pothole-marked private road outside the Santa Monica Mountains Recreation Area.

More than 100 of them bedded down last year in bottle-shaped nests tucked neatly beneath the home’s many eaves. And this week--Swallow Week in San Juan Capistrano--the birds began returning to Malibu to reclaim the weather-worn edifices.

“We thought it was a one-year fluke,” said Pam Malin, who says she likes the nests because they give her home a distinctive European ambience. “Then one of them showed up again. Then a few more. It seems strange they would pick our house out of all the houses in Malibu.”

Indeed. The Malins’ home looks more like something out of a Grimm brothers’ fairy tale than out of a history text on California’s Franciscan past.

It boasts large French windows, cherubs, a cobblestone driveway and a quaint guest house atop the garage. It also has a few contemporary touches, including a wrought-iron security fence and a pair of Rotweiler patrol dogs.

Its only apparent link to Mission San Juan Capistrano, 75 miles to the south, is the estate’s ethereal designation at the front entrance: Heaven’s Gate.

“You can call this the mission of Malibu,” Pam Malin said. “I could say there is a lot of energy that develops here.”

The arrival of the wayward flock of swallows in Malibu hasn’t exactly engendered feelings of inadequacy in San Juan Capistrano, which has its share of million-dollar homes, plenty of other swallows and a visitor center official who actually left Malibu for the south Orange County city.

“There are enough birds to go around,” said Nick Magalousis, director of the San Juan Capistrano Mission Museum, which features a special exhibit on swallows.

Mission officials insist it would take much more than one nest-infested Malibu chateau to undo a tradition first recorded by missionaries in San Juan Capistrano in 1777.

“They started coming here long before Malibu,” said spokeswoman Sudele Cooper. “We have our guarantees.”

At the mission’s visitor center, Malibu-transplant Brian McInernary said the news from his hometown isn’t all that surprising. Several years ago, he said, there were reports from Pepperdine University--several miles down Pacific Coast Highway from Heaven’s Gate--about swallows arriving there.

Over the past decade, McInernary said, the swallow population has exploded because farmers in South America, facing international pressure, have stopped using heavy doses of pesticides that were killing the birds. The swallows have already invaded much of south Orange County, building nests several years ago, for instance, in the May Co. store in Mission Viejo.

“Just as Father Serra was a missionary, converting those he met, so too are the swallows,” said McInernary, the center’s communication director. “They are expanding to greater areas and spreading the word of Capistrano.”

But at least one bird expert expressed surprise at the swallows’ new perch.

“Malibu?” queried Mayme Carver, secretary of the South Coast Audubon Society and a proud San Juan Capistrano resident.

“Obviously, they found it more appealing there. More high class,” she said. “We have busloads of Japanese tourists looking for the swallows. If they only knew.”

But Carver warned that the birds spread more than the goodwill of Capistrano.

“Every spring, my husband tells me he doesn’t like the swallows because the droppings have a habit of splattering on the bedroom window,” Carver said.

Exactly, Pam Malin said, pointing to her upstairs bedroom window.

“Some of our friends say that we should take a blowtorch and take the nests off,” said Steve Malin, a helicopter pilot. “But the groundskeeper takes care of it. We like seeing life fluttering all over. When we paint the place, we are going to paint right around their little houses.”

Several swallow watchers said Malibu provides an ideal alternative to San Juan Capistrano because it is relatively undeveloped and has the gnats, mosquitoes and water bugs the birds enjoy. What Malibu will never have, though, Carver said, is the “rich and famous” tradition of San Juan Capistrano captured in Leon Rene’s 1939 song, “When the Swallows Come Back to Capistrano.”