Swallows’ Return: A Flight of Fancy : Legend: The tale about their visit every March 19, though just a story, will still draw tourists to San Juan Capistrano this week.
Pay no attention to those swallows that have been darting about southern Orange County skies for the past week. As we all know, the swallows don’t really arrive until Tuesday, St. Joseph’s Day.
Or so legend has it.
But like all good legends, the cherished fable of the little bird’s faithful return every March 19 to San Juan Capistrano has expanded over the years.
There have been stories about the swallows soaring overhead in such great masses that they blocked the sun. There have been stories about the swallows crossing the ocean from Jerusalem with olive twigs in their beaks.
And then there is the most enduring story--the one that will bring thousands of tourists to San Juan Capistrano this week.
“Do the swallows arrive in San Juan Capistrano on exactly March 19 every year? No, it’s a community myth,” said Dick Kust, president of Sea and Sage Audubon Society in Orange County. “Everybody has to have some sense of place and tradition, even if it’s created.”
The swallows started wandering in two or three weeks ago, he said. And San Juan Capistrano resident Mayme Carver, secretary of the South Coast Audubon Society, reported that she spotted a few in her back yard last week.
Locals dismiss the early birds as “scouts,” here to check out conditions for the troops making their way northward from Argentina. “They have a communications system,” explained Sue DiMaio, a longtime resident of San Juan Capistrano.
“I got to tell you, sometimes they arrive a little early,” confessed San Juan Capistrano native Lawrence F. Buchheim, 64, the mayor pro tem. “But as far as we’re concerned, they don’t get here until March 19.”
Another myth--or, perhaps, just plain inaccuracy--surrounding the renowned San Juan Capistrano swallow is that it boasts a long, forked tail. However, the beloved creature that annually revisits the old Spanish mission is in fact a bird of a different feather--a cliff swallow, which has a short, squared tail.
“The barn swallow is the one that’s depicted on buildings all over San Juan Capistrano, because people think it’s the way a swallow ought to look,” said Sylvia Gallagher, information chairwoman of Sea and Sage Audubon Society.
A stroll through gift shops near the 215-year-old mission reveals many a trinket honoring the wrong swallow. The Capistrano Trading Post is far from alone in displaying a sign that flutters with fork-tailed swallows.
“Hollywood is close by, you know,” said DiMaio, who owned the Trading Post from 1944 until she sold it in 1989. “We have to give those birds some glamour.”
Ten years ago, DiMaio replaced the sign with one exhibiting the nondescript cliff swallow, but public pressure demanded that she revive the more impressive species. “Give them what they want--that’s the name of the game,” said DiMaio, who owns Galeria Capistrano.
Even San Juan Capistrano’s official city seal promotes the barn swallow, which inspired the fashion term “swallow-tailed coat.”
“Well, isn’t it the long-tailed swallow that flies into the mission? Or is it the short-tailed? Now you’ve got me confused,” Buchheim said. “You’d think I’d know that, wouldn’t you? You’ll have to ask somebody who’s an old-timer. I’ve only been here 64 years.”
Though it may have a stunted tail, the cliff swallow is nevertheless “a nifty bird,” Kust said. “He’s a super-flier--graceful and quick, as he zips back and forth. He’s poetry in motion.”
Cliff swallows are “site-faithful,” he added, “they attempt to go back to the places they went the year before.”
And so it is that the birds return each year to San Juan Capistrano, although they don’t always swoop down upon the mission precisely on March 19. That myth, said Orange County historian Jim St. John O’Sullivan’s recollection of the swallows’ appearance every March 19.
“He was the priest at the mission from 1910 to 1933,” Sleeper said. “On his birthday in 1911, which happily coincided with St. Joseph’s Day, he was feeling a little glum. And then suddenly this flock of swallows arrived (according to O’Sullivan), and they continued to arrive on the same date every year thereafter.”
By the mid-’30s, the tale had become cause for celebration. Buchheim remembers school pageants and dances in honor of Swallows’ Day. Then, in 1939, the popular song “When the Swallows Come Back to Capistrano” etched the fable in stone.
“The tradition put San Juan Capistrano on the map,” Sleeper said. “I was in Ireland a couple of years ago, and when I told people where I was from, they knew of Sleeper, is “lovely but unfounded.”
The first year the event was recorded in print was 1924, when a local newspaper published Father two places in Orange County: Disneyland and San Juan Capistrano.”
As the city grew, fewer and fewer swallows set up housekeeping at the mission each spring. Today the structure attracts hundreds of swallows, in contrast to the thousands that it once beckoned.
“When the legend got started, there weren’t many buildings around for the swallows to make their nests, so they came to the mission,” said local bird watcher Carver.
The birds construct their nests out of mud pellets on the underside of vertical surfaces. New buildings and bridges that have popped up in southern Orange County over the past two decades have allowed cliff swallows to spread out.
Furthermore, the insect-eating birds require open fields where mosquitoes and gnats roam, so many of the swallows have discovered undeveloped areas of Irvine.
“We might have to change the name of the song to, ‘When the Swallows Come Back to Irvine,’ ” Buchheim quipped.
In recent years, March 19 has welcomed more pigeons than swallows, tempting tourists to use their imaginations. “On St. Joseph’s Day, people see a bird and say, ‘It must be a swallow, because here I am at the mission,’ ” Gallagher said.
“I’ve seen TV reports two years in a row where they filmed European starlings and claimed they were swallows,” Gallagher noted. “Anything that flies has got to be a swallow that day.”
Should there ever come a March 19 when the swallows bypass the San Juan Capistrano Mission altogether, festivities will proceed as normal, Carver predicted.
“It’s a beautiful celebration of the beginning of spring,” she said. “Wouldn’t you still have Christmas even if Santa Claus didn’t come around anymore?”
TAILING THE CLIFF SWALLOW
Description: Has pointed wings and slender body as all swallows do; differentiated from other species by squarish tail. Most cliff swallows have a dark chestnut and blackish throat, and a pale forehead.
Habitat: Common around bridges, rural settlements and in open country on cliffs; requires a source of mud for nest construction.
Diet: Catches insects on the fly.
Nest: Colonies of up to 1,000 pairs build nests of mud pellets on the underside of bridges, cliffs and other vertical surfaces.
Eggs: White, creamy or pinkish, spotted with brown; less than one inch long.
