"It's the Paris-Dakar rally of birding, " says spokesman John Bianchi, of the National Audubon Society, with a straight face.
It is the first fatality on this year's Dakar Rally, which has relocated to Argentina and Chile for its 31st edition.
South African motorcyclist Elmer Symons, 29, competing in his first Dakar Rally, died after an accident during the fourth stage on 9 January.
Metzge, who won the Paris-Dakar Rally three times, organized the first Louis Vuitton Classic and has been working with the brand ever since.
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The Dakar Rally is likely to start in a different location in 2009 after its three-year contract with Portugal comes to an end.
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Defending motorcycle champion Marc Coma sealed the 20th stage win of his Dakar Rally career as rival Cyril Despres got stuck in the mud.
The Galgorm man now plans to take part in the Dakar Rally in 2013 along with other wounded soldiers in the fundraising 'Race2Recovery' initiative.
Lyndon Poskitt, a BAE Systems engineer from Garstang in Lancashire, is preparing to compete in the Dakar Rally on a motorbike he built himself.
McRae filled in his time with appearances on the Dakar Rally across the Sahara Desert, and at the Le Mans 24-Hour Race, as well as intermittent one-off returns to the world rally championship.
There also have been deaths at the Baja 1000 and Dakar Rally, the two most famous off-road races, though multiple-death crashes into the crowd like the one in the Mojave Desert are rare.
He was equally unhappy about the annual Paris-Dakar motor rally in which dozens of rugged vehicles roar through the Sahara, churning up the sands.
He also turned to motor racing, competing in the Paris to Dakar car rally, before he came out of retirement for one season only, winning the 1973 U.S. pro ski tour.
The rally used to take place between Paris and Dakar in Senegal but is now staged in South America for security reasons.
In the wake of those events, race organizers decided to relocate the rally for the following year, so the Dakar moved to a new continent in 2009.
It is the fifth time the rally has taken place in South America, having formerly finished in the Senegalese capital of Dakar.
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