Famed Swallows Pick Wal-Mart Over Mission

It’s swallow season, and the birds have built their distinctive mud nests in the eaves of their Orange County home. Not Mission San Juan Capistrano--this is San Clemente Self Storage.

For years now, the swallows haven’t been returning in large numbers to the mission, their home of legend, if not in fact. Fake nests and releases of ladybugs, a favored food, haven’t managed to bring the flocks there.

So where have the swallows gone?

Just think of them as modern Southern Californians, hanging out where everyone else does. The self-storage place. A Wal-Mart. Freeway overpasses. A community college.

“They’re just little, special treasures,” said Joanne Walters, who works at the storage center with her husband, David.

As the birds migrated to the self-storage business, some of the swallow watchers followed them. Walters said she gets a couple of bird watchers every other day.

“We’ve had a few people say they drove out of their way” just to see the swallows, Walters said, adding that she has done nothing to get the news out. It just spread by word of mouth.

The couple live in a corner apartment above the office in the storage complex on Avenida la Pata, which sits atop one of San Clemente’s many hills.

Walters watched a baby swallow poke its beak through a hole in the nest in the corner of her balcony as she spoke of the day in early May when the birds seemed to appear from nowhere.

“They just started circling one day, making their curious sounds,” she said. “They were calling other swallows here.”

Since then, swallows have built at least 20 nests in the nooks and corners of the large building, where they will raise their young over the summer.

Swallows long have been known to nest at the mission, which was built in 1776 and used to be the only large man-made structure in south Orange County, mission spokesman Jim Graves said.

Father John O’Sullivan, who led rebuilding efforts at the mission from 1910 to 1933, observed the small birds’ annual return and wrote the myth that the swallows always return on March 19, St. Joseph’s Day. San Juan Capistrano continues to celebrate Swallows’ Day each year in late March.

But the number of swallows at the mission has dwindled sharply in recent years, because of mission restoration efforts and because a multitude of other buildings in south Orange County now provide the conditions the birds require for nesting, Graves said.

Graves said hundreds of swallows nested at the mission as recently as 1989, when a preservation project began at the old church.

“Because of the need to preserve and restore the church, we had to put up a scaffold,” Graves said. “In the process of scaffolding, many of the nests were destroyed. So the swallows went elsewhere.”

Only a few have returned. Graves said he saw just three or four swallows annually in the early 1990s.

The mission has tried to encourage their return by building ceramic nests, increasing the availability of mud and releasing ladybugs.

Even so, there are only 12 swallows this year, Graves said.

But if the mission isn’t a swallow hot spot anymore, Saddleback College in Mission Viejo is: An arch near the entrance to its Technology and Applied Science Building houses a number of swallows. So does the Wal-Mart in San Clemente. Graves said freeway overpasses are another popular spot.

Bill Baker, a wildlife photographer in San Juan Capistrano, has been documenting the birds since their arrival at Saddleback last year.

“We just fell in love with these guys, and we wanted to get to know them,” Baker said. “So we started to study them.”

Baker eventually turned his work with swallows into a wildlife video, segments of which have aired on nature programs on PBS.

Baker is also studying and photographing the swallows at the self-storage building.

The Walterses have “the opportunity to see this entire life cycle up close, without a telephoto lens,” Baker said. “They have virtually welcomed this wildlife into their home.”

Baker said there may be a day soon when the swallows won’t return, even to places like the self-storage complex, because of the advance of industry and development.

“If business and industry can learn more about the swallows and learn to work around them, it can make for a more harmonious situation for them,” Baker said. Joanne and David Walters have been willing to do that. But it hasn’t been entirely easy.

“[My husband] has to go out and sweep the balcony every other day,” Joanne Walters said. “And we can’t even barbecue, because [the smoke] might hurt the babies.”