Swallows’ Itinerary Avoids Mission
It’s swallows season, and the much-watched birds have built their distinctive mud nests in the eaves of their south Orange County home. Not Mission San Juan Capistrano. This is San Clemente Self Storage.
For years now, everyone knows that the swallows haven’t been returning in large numbers to the mission, their home of legend if not actual fact. Fake nests and releases of ladybugs, a favored food, haven’t managed to bring in the flocks.
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 Walter, who works at the storage center with her husband, David.
And now her business is something of a tourist draw. As the birds migrated there, some of the swallow-watchers have followed them. Walter said she gets a couple of bird-watchers every other day.
“We’ve had a few people say they drove out of their way [to see the swallows],” Walter 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. The office sits atop one of San Clemente’s many rolling hills.
Joanne Walter watched a baby swallow poke its beak out from 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 out of nowhere.
“They just started circling one day, making their curious sounds,” she said. “They were calling other swallows here.”
Since their arrival in early May, the swallows have built at least 20 nests in the nooks and corners of a large building, where they will raise their young over the summer.
Swallows have long 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 as well as the multitude of buildings in south Orange County that offer ideal conditions for the birds’ nest homes, Graves said.
Graves said hundreds of swallows nested at the mission as recently as 1989, just as the mission began a preservation project on the old church. The church was popular with the swallows at the time and littered with nests.
“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.”
Since then, few swallows have returned to the mission. Graves said he saw just three or four swallows a year in the early 1990s.
The mission is trying to encourage the birds to return by building ceramic nests, increasing the mud supply and releasing ladybugs.
Even so, just 12 swallows showed up this year, Graves said.
But if the mission isn’t a swallow hot spot anymore, Saddlback College in Mission Viejo is. An arch near the entrance to the Technology & Applied Science Building houses a number of swallows, as does the Wal-Mart in San Clemente. Graves said freeway overpasses are another popular spot for the birds.
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 created 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 Walters] 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 building because of the advance of industry and development. Swallows need a source of mud for their nests, fresh water, a high nest location facing the sun for warmth and open areas where the insects on which they feed thrive.
If those needs aren’t fulfilled, the swallows won’t come back, Baker said.
Right now the storage business is nestled in relatively open hills, a lone beacon much as the mission was a century ago. Much of the open space in east San Clemente, including the hills near the self-storage building, will be developed as part of the 4,400-home Talega development, scheduled for completion by 2010.
“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 Walter have been willing to live in harmony with the swallows. But it hasn’t been entirely easy.
“[My husband] has to go out and sweep the balcony every other day,” Joanne said. “And we can’t even barbecue, because [the smoke] might hurt the babies.”
