If you ever dreamed of flying like a bird over the San Diego County coastline, a tandem paragliding pilot at the Torrey Pines Gliderport can take you up for a ride. But there’s only one local pilot who can take you flying with the birds.
Dave Metzgar is both a tandem paragliding pilot and a falconer. And when he takes passengers out on half-hour “parahawking” flights, they’re accompanied on wing by one of his three trained Lanner falcons. The sleek birds of prey fly alongside the paraglider making frequent eye contact, swoop above and below and sometimes land on a hand-held perch to nibble a bit of food before soaring away again.
Metzgar, a 51-year-old microbiologist and wildlife conservationist, said riding the winds with a falcon by your side is the closest a human can come to experiencing life from a bird’s-eye view.
“It’s like lucid dreaming,” he said of the experience. “There’s a magic when you’re there flying next to a bird. You feel like you’re a bird and it’s perfectly natural and safe to be up there. It transcends the human condition.”
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Metzgar is one of just a half-dozen parahawking pilots in the world. There aren’t more, he says, because it’s hard to make any money doing it. It can takes years of work to train the birds, and years more to get the proper licenses and permits, not to mention the cost of running a paragliding business.
Thanks to a long and successful career in the local biotechnology industry, money isn’t Metzgar’s motivation for parahawking. He simply enjoys sharing the experience with others and uses it as a platform to teach the public about bird conservation.
“My goal is to keep it alive and make it happen as a once-in-a-lifetime experience people can do before they die,” he said.
David Metzgar flies a paraglider as his lanner falcon Sophia follows in La Jolla on Jan.14, 2020. Metzgar runs Total Raptor Experience, where he teaches (on land and air) about falcons, hawks and owls. Guests can also fly in a paraglider as his lanner falcon fly along side them.
(K.C. Alfred / The San Diego Union-Tribune)
Metzgar has had a lifelong love affair with flying. Raised in Missoula, Mont., by his father, a wildlife biologist and hang-gliding instructor, Metzgar got his own hang-gliding license at age 14. During the winters in his mid-teens, they would travel together to hang-glide in Utah, Colorado, Baja California and Lake Elsinore. One place he couldn’t fly with his dad was the Torrey Pines Gliderport, which required an advanced piloting license. But he never forgot how beautiful it was.
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After high school he joined the Army to fly planes. His end goal was to become a smoke-jumping pilot/firefighter. But one stormy winter day he and some fellow parachute-riggers were blowing off steam by para-sailing behind a moving truck. He was flying 80 feet in the air when a cross-gust folded up his chute and he hit the frozen ground at 80 miles an hour. He spent the next nine months in a military hospital. When he was discharged, he was told he would never fly again. Instead, he went to college and earned a biology degree, like his dad.
For graduate school, he chose UC San Diego, where he studied biotechology, diagnostics and epidemiology. The fact that the university he selected was across the street from the Torrey Pines Gliderport was no coincidence. Although he’d nearly died in a parachuting accident, he wanted to learn paragliding.
Metzgar went on to earn his doctorate at UCSD, then worked for the Navy doing public health research, followed by work in the diagnostics field at Ibis Biosciences and Abbott Labs. When he wasn’t working, Metzgar was paragliding at Torrey Pines. That’s where, in 2009, he met his wife, Antonella Zampolli, a biomedical scientist for the Scripps Research Institute. She moved to San Diego from her native Italy in 2005 and took up paragliding. She is also a falconer. The couple lives with their birds in a house at the foot of Black Mountain near Rancho Penasquitos.
She compares her husband’s personality to that of Reggie, one of the three Lanner falcons he flies with at Torrey Pines.
Sophia, a lanner falcon, flies along as David Metzgar parahawks in La Jolla on Jan.14, 2020.
(K.C. Alfred / The San Diego Union-Tribune)
“He has a little Reggie in him. he loves flying and he’s not afraid to try anything,” Zampolli said. “He’s gregarious and loves animals and is very ecologically minded.”
Metzgar’s interest in falconry began 17 years ago when he made a side trip to Nepal while attending a medical conference in Singapore. In the Nepalese town of Pokhara, he went flying with parahawking pioneer Scott Mason, a British falconer who trained several Egyptian vultures to accompany his flights.
After he returned home, Metzgar started studying falconry and in 2013 he, Zampolli and avian ecologist and educator Terry Lockwood co-founded Total Raptor Experience. Based at Lockwood’s ranch in Ramona, the business offers avian encounters and classes in falconry. Metzgar also offers falcon encounters at the Gliderport, where two to three groups of visitors each day meet the birds and watch them free-fly around the cliffs.
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In 2015, he started offering Fly With a Bird parahawking tandem flights through a joint partnership with the Torrey Pines Gliderport. About five or six people a week sign up for the $400 flights. Most of them, Metzgar said, are veteran bird-watchers who’ve always dreamed of experiencing life on the wing.
These days, Metzgar works as a science consultant just one day a week so he can afford to spend the other six days at Torrey Pines with his birds. The three Lanner falcons who take part in the flights are Bunco, a good-natured 7-year-old male; Sophia, a strong-willed, independent 6-year-old female; and the impulsive 3-year-old Reggie.
Rain or shine, each of the falcons flies alone or with Metzgar for at least two hours a day. Spending 16 hours a day in the sun and wind, Metzgar is easy to spot at the cliffs, with his deeply tanned skin, wind-blown shoulder-length silver-blonde hair and an orange plastic whistle strung around his neck.
David Metzgar flies a tandem paraglider with Martina Manisova as his lanner falcon Bunco follows as they parahawk in La Jolla on Jan.14, 2020.
(K.C. Alfred/The San Diego Union-Tribune)
Lanner falcons are a species of African/Mediterranean birds of prey. Though highly trainable, they’re not pets, Zampolli said. They tolerate humans for the food and protection they provide.
“It’s a relationship built on trust,” she said. “They’re not social like a dog. They don’t really care about us. But when we fly we become slightly more interesting to them. They look at us and say: ‘Oh, look at that, you’re not very fast, but at least you’re interesting.’ ”
One thing the falcons had to learn at Torrey Pines was how to coexist in the bird-heavy environment. The cliffs are home to native nesting birds, gulls, ravens, kestrels and peregrine falcons. Birds were the first to discover the unique wind condition at Torrey Pines known as a laminar lift. Winds from the ocean strike the cliffs and channel upward, accompanied on warm days by rising pockets of sun-heated air called thermals. Together, they provide a near-constant stream of lift for both birds and paragliders up to 200 days a year.
Metzgar said many of his parahawking passengers are astonished that the free-flying falcons always choose to return to him when they could easily fly away. But he said the birds are strategic in their loyalty.
“To people, it’s a miracle the birds will fly for us, but for the birds, it’s a miracle that they found this species of giant predators who will give you meat and other birds won’t come near you,” he said. “They know they’ve got it good.”
David Metzgar works with his falcon Sophia doing lure-flying at the Torrey Pines Gliderport in La Jolla on Jan.14, 2020. Metzgar runs Total Raptor Experience, where he teaches (on land and air) about falcons, hawks and owls. Guests can also fly in a paraglider as his lanner falcon fly along side them.
(K.C. Alfred / The San Diego Union-Tribune)
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