Mission Plans to Offer Perks for Swallows

For more than 60 years, the annual return of the swallows to Mission San Juan Capistrano has turned this city into an international attraction.

But all the folklore surrounding the winged visitors and their heralded March 19 arrival can’t mask the fact that the swallows are abandoning Father Junipero Serra’s mission, prompting an intense effort to lure them back.

Most of the tiny birds’ mud nests that covered arches and eaves of the 219-year-old edifice have been wiped out by state-mandated work to make the mission earthquake safe. And the bulk of the swallows displaced over the past six years since the seismic retrofitting are finding other places for their seasonal home.

“We literally lost hundreds of nests,” said the mission’s administrator, Gerald Miller, adding that only about a dozen nests remain.

Mission officials, bird groups and other volunteers, worried about losing the swallows forever, last week began busily working on a plan to entice the birds back.

“Without some kind of outside efforts, I think probably the swallows’ days are numbered, and within five years they (all) would be nesting somewhere else,” said Linda McLeod Evans, executive director of the Laguna Niguel-based Pacific Wildlife Project.

Ideas being considered to attract the birds include installing wooden nest boxes, clay replica nests and creating a mud “swallows wallow.” Officials are also pondering whether to have volunteers help clear pesky 12-foot-high reeds along nearby San Juan Creek that choke off the birds’ access to the fresh mud needed to build or repair their seasonal homes.

According to legend, the area’s relationship with the birds dates back as far as the late 1700s, when Father Serra is said to have welcomed the swallows each spring. The birds’ return to the mission attracts media attention from as far away as Iceland, Britain, Japan and Italy. An average of 10,000 visitors show up on March 19 to see the small birds.

Visitors could watch hundreds of swallows fly overheard over a several-day period, but in recent years, only a handful of the swallows have been spotted.

Since the mission has been disrupted by repair work, the birds, which migrate from South America to the Southland from roughly March to October, are flourishing elsewhere, such as at a department store in Mission Viejo and the undersides of bridges along Interstate 5.

They also have set up spring homes at spots closer to mud and flying insects that create their habitat, such as cliffs near the Ronald W. Caspers Regional Park, east of San Juan Capistrano.

“If they have a hard time getting mud and other materials, they will go to another place that is more hospitable,” said Ken Fortune, a South Coast Audubon Society member who is also working on the project to get the swallows back to the mission.

Besides the earthquake retrofitting that destroyed most of the nests, encroaching development and other gradual changes to the town’s once rural atmosphere have made the mission less inviting to swallows, Fortune said. Dirt roads and horses have given way to asphalt and automobiles. Swallows want open space to swoop down for food and building supplies.

Rather than trying to import swallows’ nests from other nearby habitat areas, the birds should be enticed to their historic mission home, Fortune and Evans agree. Wooden nest boxes or clay replica nests could serve as temporary measures over the next couple of years, until more swallows choose the mission as their nesting place again.

In a city where the swallows are a fabled link to its past, it is hoped the project will capture the imagination and energy of residents eager to volunteer. There are no fewer than half a dozen local businesses that use the word “swallows” in their name, and the town has its own local publication called the Swallows Tale.

Publisher Tim Bolen said the swallows’ plight reflects that of the downtown, which has seen businesses struggle or close shop during the recession.

“We recognize that we don’t have the swallows in the same numbers we had before, and it’s a disaster,” Bolen said.

While the swallows have departed from the mission in droves, long-time resident and civic leader Richard J. O’Neill said there’s been a gradual decline in the numbers of birds that used to be seen throughout the community.

When the town grew in the 1960s, the swallows were considered by some newcomers to be a nuisance, and some residents knocked the nests down from their the homes. The city now has an ordinance forbidding destruction of nests. First offense brings a $100 fine.

“As long as the swallows were going to the mission, nobody worried about it,” O’Neill said.

Fortune said that the birds should be promoted as a valuable asset.

“What other country heralds the return of the swallows?” he asked.

Miller said he’s confident that the swallows will return in larger numbers once the welcome mat is put out.

“If they can bring back moose populations and wolf populations, I think they can bring our swallows back,” he said.