Until Now, the Legend Was Hard to Swallow

Among the natural phenomena I would generally not drive out of my way to see are the two-headed snakes of Boise, the deep holes of Kansas and the swallows coming back to Capistrano.

However, I happened to be bumming around Orange County in the vicinity of the mission the birds regard as their summer home when, motivated by a primeval need to nest, they flew in.

Their arrival missed by one day the annual influx of tourists, some from as far away as Deep Hole, Kan. They came to town wearing plaid shorts and flowered shirts, a mix that probably won’t be featured in Vogue, but then haute couture is not a consideration when you’re there to look at birds.

As it turned out, there were more tourists than swallows clogging the Mission San Juan Capistrano, especially the gift shop, where one could buy enough religious trinkets to cover every mortal sin ever committed anywhere.

It reminded me of Lourdes, where there’s not a lot to do unless you’re a leper, but the number of souvenir shops along the Rue de la Grotto are amazing for the variety of their religious relics. I bought a jiggling Jesus for the dashboard of my car and a bottle of grotto water for my sister Emily in Oakland, who prays for me.

I came down with the flu in Lourdes, leading me to believe that neither God nor Bernadette was happy with my attitude toward religion, so I’m pretty much sticking to birds in this column.

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The swallow return is a weeklong event in Capistrano, with music, dancing, fast food, gewgaw sales and other public activities, both secular and ecclesiastic. My wife, Cinelli, and I were there on St. Joseph’s Day, when the birds are supposed to officially soar in with the grace and beauty of aerial ballerinas.

The lady who sold us tickets at the mission assured us that they had arrived that morning at 8:15. “You can see some of them up under the eaves,” she said.

I looked up. The eaves were about 30 feet off the ground. “Do we rent a cherry picker somewhere,” I asked pleasantly, “or will deep prayer lift us to the required height?”

“Leave her alone,” Cinelli said, dragging me away, “and keep remembering what happened at Lourdes.”

For those unfamiliar with the mindless return of birds to a small town in Southern California, this has apparently been going on since the mission was founded in 1776. The creatures fly 7,500 miles from their winter home in Goya, Argentina, in order to nest in the eaves of urban America.

Why here instead of, say, Malibu or Beverly Hills? I’m not sure, but I suspect it has to do with aggressive marketing by the local visitors’ bureau, and perhaps a reluctance by tonier places to tolerate bird poo-poo. We would probably welcome the swallows to Topanga, however, since we are noted for opening our hearts to everything from vampire bats to werewolves.

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The swallows are supposed to announce their arrival with “noisy, squeaky twittering,” according to one brochure, but with Jacque Nunez and the Juaneno Band of Mission Indians playing loudly in the courtyard, it would have been difficult to hear wild screaming, much less squeaky twittering.

We wandered through the heat of the day, eyes ever upward, tingling with the anticipation of sudden birds. Many years ago the swallows decided, for reasons of their own, to nest in the eaves of a hotel near the plaza but were chased away because they dirtied on the patrons. So they came back to the mission to dirty on the tourists.

I began wondering what would happen if the swallows, like the birds in Hitchcock’s movie, suddenly went berserk and began pecking the hell out of the tourists.

I could imagine Nebraskans and Texans fleeing for their wretched lives like Japanese extras running from Godzilla, trinket booths and taco stands spilling on to the lawn, and mothers shielding their babies from birds filled with a hatred of our species, swooping in and pecking, pecking, pecking. . . .

“Look,” Cinelli suddenly shouted, “birds!” It was 2:58 p.m. One swallow, then two, then three, came straggling in like economy-class passengers from Macon, Georgia, and that was it. Three birds. This was the legendary return of the swallows to Capistrano? The fabled birds of song and story? The graceful swarm?

We left shortly thereafter to drive back up I-5 into L.A., where the only birds that matter are the ones served at Koo Koo Roo. It was somewhere around the Jamboree Road turnoff that Cinelli shouted “Birds!” again. But this time she was not just the woman who cried bird. This time there were birds.

The sky was filled with the crazy little things, diving and swirling and turning . . . and turning . . . and . . . turning?

“They’re lost,” I said.

“Birds don’t get lost,” Cinelli said.

“Then why,” I asked in the grand manner of someone who knows best, “are the stupid little beasts headed toward Newport Beach instead of Capistrano?”

“Not stupid,” she said wisely. “They are simply pausing for a martini on Balboa Bay.”

Makes sense to me. Pour me a dry one, bartender, and buy a round for the birds.