THE-C9HI)?R 



Volvime IX November-December 1907 Number 6 



WHITE-THROATED SWIFTS AT CAPISTRANO 

 By FLORENCE MERRIAM BAILEY 



THE only swifts we had seen during a month's field work in California had 

 been in the San Jacinto Mountains where, as usual, the birds were circling 

 among high cliffs; but when, toward the middle of July we reached Capis- 

 trano, in passing the ruins of the famous mission to which our eyes turned invol- 

 untarily, our steps were arrested and we exclaimed in amazement, for circling 

 about over the interesting old walls, mixed in among a large flock of eave swallows 

 were a few White-throated Swifts {Aeronatites melanoleiiciis) . Tho few they 

 were easily picked out from the nondescript swallows by their clean-cut cross-bow 

 forms patched with white. 



Their wild, shrieked-out notes recalled canyons walled with rock in the depths 

 of the mountains and we marvelled that the birds should stop even in passing at 

 such a place as this. For altho the mission is a ruin, part of it is still in use and 

 the old green mission bells still clang loudly when the priest comes; moreover, 

 while surrounded by a sleepy Mexican village the mission stands on the automobile 

 highway between I^os Angeles and San Diego over which whizzing touring cars 

 toot at all hours, and still worse, twenty rods away the Santa Fe trains whistle and 

 puff and rumble over their tracks. As we watched the Eave Swallows {Petrochel- 

 idon hmifrons) whose nests line many of the mission arches we wondered if the 

 presence of their large colony had not given encouragement to the swifts, 

 had not made it easier for this little band of cliff dwellers to decide to take up 

 their abode among men. 



That they had taken up their abode in the Mission of course remained to be 

 proved, but the old ruin suddenly took on new interest — tell it, or not, to the 

 archeologist — and was explored with one eye to the dim historic past and one eye 

 to the vivid, living, ornithological present. To think of having White-throated 

 Swifts in a building' — even a ruined one — where you could watch them close at 

 hand! The nearest approach my lucky star had previously vouchsafed had been 

 at the foot of the sandstone cliffs of Acoma where, high overhead, belittled black 

 figures had been seen squeezing into cracks in the rock. 



