The following originally ran in the Orange County Register on July 11, 2013:

Finally, the swallows have come home to San Juan

By MEGHANN M. CUNIFF / ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

A clay nest high in the rafters at Mission San Juan Capistrano holds what’s long been missing at this historic town’s most prized attraction.

Two cliff swallows spotted there in late June have made the nest their home, delighting mission officials who have long tried to bring the birds back in light of construction and renovation efforts that have pushed them elsewhere.

“It’s huge,” said Mechelle Lawrence Adams, the mission’s executive director. “The swallows are like our avian ambassadors.”

The nest is the first spotted at the mission in recent history. Hundreds used to flock to the mission every year, staying from March through October and earning the city a national reputation that it commemorates with the annual Swallows Festival each March.

The birds nested in the Great Stone Church but haven’t been back there since a 15-year renovation effort that ended in 2004. Mission officials have been working with swallows experts to try to bring the birds back by playing their mating calls through an iPod near the Great Stone Church.

Chapman University professor Walter Piper visited the mission last week to look at the nest.

“It’s clearly an active nest,” Piper said. “Certainly next year our hopes will be high that this pair might return and others might join them. We’ll have our fingers crossed.”

But it’s just too early to tell whether the nest is the beginning of a larger migration to the mission.

“It’s good that there’s a nest there, but it’d be hard to read much into it yet, given that it’s just one nest,” said Charles Brown, a swallows expert and University of Tulsa professor who, along with Piper, helped with the iPod migration calls. But, he said, “one-nest colonies are rare. If there’s one, there’s usually more.”

The Rev. Michael Pontarelli spotted the nest in late June and told Monsignor Arthur Holquin, the mission’s rector and pastor, who said it was the first he’d seen in the 10 years he’s been at the mission.

The nest is located at the roof of the priests’ home on the northeast side of the building, which is not accessible to mission visitors. The secluded area is far from the Great Stone Church where the iPod calls were played, leading Piper and Brown to believe the new nest may be unrelated. Piper said he saw several colonies in San Juan Capistrano, including one of about 60 nests at an apartment complex about a quarter mile north of the mission.

“That colony is still active this year, despite the fact that the owners of the apartment complex where the nests are power-sprayed the mud nests to remove them last fall,” Piper said in an email. “In other words, the complex removed all of the nests built in 2012, but the birds rebuilt them from scratch this year!”

The mission’s two swallows may be part of that colony, Piper said.

“There’s a lot of good habitat there,” Piper said. “It was just a matter of when will they discover it and colonize it. Maybe this is the beginning of a trend.”

Lawrence Adams said the swallows have helped San Juan Capistrano and the mission establish a national reputation that attracts visitors of all ages.

“Those guys have done us a favor, so we need to do the birds a favor, too, and try to help them continue to nest here,” she said.

Contact the writer: Contact the writer: mcuniff@ocregister.com or (949) 492-5122. Twitter: @meghanncuniff.