Flying the Coop : In Hard-to-Swallow Change of Course, Mission’s Feathered Friends Prove Fickle by Flocking to Ventura

If residents of San Juan Capistrano are wondering where all their famous feathered tourist attractions have flown, they may want to take a drive to Ventura.

For the second year in a row, thousands of swallows have pumped their little wings for more than 6,000 miles--and then another 100 past Orange County--to return to sunny Ventura.

Although swallows can be found all over the county, the colorful, little, mosquito-eating birds appear to be particularly fond of Ventura Harbor, where hundreds of their mud- and saliva-soaked nests peek out from the eaves of the Harbortown Marina Resort.

There are enough of them swooping and divebombing the grounds to make Alfred Hitchcock edgy.

“I’ve never seen such a concentration of swallows in Ventura before,” said Virgil Ketner, a board member of the Ventura Audubon Society. “I think Ventura County is becoming a sort of swallow center. We have more than Capistrano, I think.”

Whoa. Fighting words.

True, a state-mandated seismic retrofitting of Mission San Juan Capistrano has decreased its swallow population, but city officials aren’t about to fold their wings when it comes to their No. 1 seasonal tourist attraction.

“We don’t have as many swallows coming back to the mission, but they’re building nests on buildings all over town, even at the mall,” said Tom Facon, executive director of San Juan Capistrano’s Chamber of Commerce. “They’ve just spread out.”

And Ventura’s swallows? “They’re not our swallows,” Facon said. “Our swallows always return.”

Each year, hundreds of thousands of tourists flock to the mission to see the swallows’ March arrival and October departure for Goya, Argentina. Only Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm beat the mission’s attendance figures in Orange County, Facon said. City leaders even peddle tourists a factually dubious legend about some padre inviting the birds to the mission 200 years ago.

“It’s just a legend, but people like it,” Facon said. “It’s a romantic kind of thing.”

San Juan Capistrano Mayor Wyatt T. Hart is willing to admit that some of the city’s famous birds have flown the coop.

“Well, maybe a few got off course,” Hart conceded. “We got a mission, [Ventura has] got a mission, and we both have harbors. Maybe they’re following the mission trail. But they always come back to San Juan Capistrano.”

The truth of the matter is that nobody’s really sure where the swallows came from, especially considering that they are actually known to live all over California and not just in San Juan Capistrano and Goya, Argentina. Some Ventura Audubon members suspect that many of the harbor’s swallows were living nearby at the water treatment plant.

“They weren’t as visible over there as they are now,” Ketner said. “But the colony really seems to have grown.”

The winged wonders appear drawn to the eaves below Harbortown’s raised walkway. They fly nearly continuous flight patterns to a nearby farm field, where they find a ready supply of mud for their earthen nests.

Although guests usually pay more than $100 a night to stay at the marina hotel, Harbortown’s management isn’t complaining about the swarm of feathered freeloaders.

“Yes, they stay here for free, but that’s OK,” said Kaye Aina, the hotel’s general manager. “But they don’t get room service or phone calls.”

And as San Juan Capistrano residents know, their accommodations don’t come with toilets either.

Hotel staff members hose down the walkway four times a day.

“This was cleaned just an hour ago,” Aina said, pointing to the many Rorschach-like blots beneath the legion of nests.

And what do the paying guests think about the birds?

“I tell [them] that if they poop on you, it’s a good omen,” Aina said. “It’s good luck.”