Saturday, September 10, 2005
By KEVIN COURTNEY
Register Staff Writer
With more than 40,000 people looking on, Zach Wagner and his pigeons will be in the
spotlight at SBC Park on Sunday.
During a pre-game 9/11 memorial ceremony, Zach will release 100 white homing pigeons,
including 15 raised in his Napa backyard. Spiraling higher and higher, the birds should
inspire awe and peace in San Francisco Giants fans.
Zach, a 14-year-old freshman at Vintage High School, expects to feel both excitement and
concern. When his birds fly out of the ball park, will they be up to the challenge of
navigating over unfamiliar terrain to make it back to their Napa coop?
In a Labor Day test run from the Golden Gate Bridge, all but one made it home safely.
Zach is one of Napa's few pigeon fanciers. These days not many people raise pigeons,
either the sleek, white homing beauties or their motley urban cousins. There is no pigeon
section at Petco.
What Zach's fellow teens likely don't know is that there's money to be made in pigeons.
Marketed as "white doves," pigeons add poignancy and flare to weddings, funerals and
other wine country events.
Actual doves wouldn't fly on command, Mike Wagner said. White pigeons will.
Zach's Web site, www.dovesofnapavalley.com, offers the release of a pair of white
"doves" for $125. For a flock of 14, the fee is $175.
His business is growing. After doing a funeral and a wedding this summer, he has two
weddings booked for Saturday, then the big event at SBC Park on Sunday.
Zach said he dresses as the event requires. For weddings and funerals, he wears his
church suit, with black pants, white shirt, jacket and tie.
Zach offered his pigeons for the 9/11 memorial at no charge. A major Napa pigeon man,
Gene Rose of Celebrations in Flight, is supplying the bulk of the birds on a similar basis.
Zach's father, Dr. Mike Wagner, will be there with a camera. Photos of the birds at SBC
Park should provide persuasive images for Zach's Web site, he said.
Besides pigeons, Zach also raises 4-H pigs. He showed and sold two at this year's Napa
Town and Country Fair.
While making money with pigeons is nice, that's not the best part of his hobby, Zach said.
"It's doing it with my dad," he said.
His father, a Kaiser Permanente physician, raised pigeons as a kid in Napa. The Napa
Valley's popularity for weddings creates commercial possibilities for pigeons that weren't
there when he was a boy.
Zach is also being mentored by Rose, who helped out when catastrophe struck his flock
last year.
A bobcat that had been secretly living in an adjacent blackberry patch squeezed into
Zach's pigeon coop and devoured all eight birds. The cat was dispatched by the county
trapper. Grieving his loss, Zach began rebuilding his flock.
"It was a struggle at first keeping the birds alive," said Mike Wagner. Hawks struck
pigeons taking flight, leaving behind a puff of feathers. Even the family dog, Max, turned
out to be a pigeon molester.
With adults worth $30, every loss is costly.
These days, with a variety of defenses in place, the pigeons are thriving. Since pigeons
are prolific breeders, Zach's flock could more than double by next year.
His birds' homing abilities are amazing, Zach said. "When they are born here, they just
come back here. It's instinct, I guess. They're homing pigeons."
To make sure his flock can make it back from San Francisco, Zach and his parents have
gone on training runs, setting the birds free at greater and greater distances from their
west Napa home.
On Labor Day, the first pigeon made it from the Golden Gate Bridge to Napa in about an
hour and a half, Zach said. That's a distance of about 40 miles, as the pigeon flies.
Since his birds will be flying home with a much larger flock, Zach worries that they could
become confused. "I hope they don't all go to Gene's house," he said.
The release at SBC on Sunday will be before the 1 p.m. Giants game with the Chicago
Cubs. The ceremony will not be televised, a Giants spokesman said.
"I'm a little nervous," Zach said. "We'll have to get there early and set up the pigeons."
The trick will be to simultaneously open up all the bird boxes so the pigeons soar as one,
he said.
Once Zach's pigeons depart SBC, they'll be on their own getting home.
The Wagners, meanwhile, will stay in the city and see the Giants-Cubs game. "We're big
Giants fans, too," his mother, Cathy, said.
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