The National Center for Falcons opens its seventh annual falcon auction on 1 October at its headquarters in Malham, north of Riyadh, and will run it through 30 November. Ahead of the opening, the center published its six-year accounting: SR45.3 million ($12 million) in sales across 455 falcons since the auction began in 2020, according to the Saudi Press Agency.
The series behind the total is more interesting than the total. The first edition sold 102 falcons for SR10 million. Last year’s sold 40 for SR6.4 million. Read as revenue, that is a market shrinking. Read per bird, it is the opposite: the average falcon brought roughly SR98,000 in 2020 and about SR160,000 in 2025, with the climb concentrated in the last two editions, from about SR85,000 in 2023 to SR120,000 in 2024 and then last year’s figure. Fewer birds are crossing the block, and buyers are paying more for each one.
What sells at this auction explains why the scarcity is design rather than symptom. The floor deals exclusively in migratory juvenile peregrines, the shaheen bahri prized in Gulf falconry, trapped inside the Kingdom during the passage season. The center’s field teams support licensed trappers through the season with transport, accommodation and sales documentation, and every result is recorded and broadcast, on television and the center’s channels, bird by bird.
The services are the incentive and the documentation is the point. A trapper who sells through Malham gets logistics, a televised price and paperwork; the trade gets a ledger. A market that ran for generations through private dealers now has one legal, visible channel for wild-caught birds, with the volume constraints a regulated channel implies. A falling bird count and a rising price are what capped supply meeting steady demand looks like, and the cap is the policy.
The wild auction is also the smaller half of a two-sided market that shares the same hall. In August, Malham hosted the International Falcon Breeders Auction, where captive-bred birds from farms in Europe and beyond set the season’s reference prices; last year’s edition sold more than 1,100 falcons from 67 farms in 23 countries. Against that volume, 40 wild peregrines a year is a boutique supply, and it commands boutique prices. The weight of the trade has moved to captive breeding, and the wild channel survives as the regulated, premium exception.
The participation numbers carry one caution. The center counted 237 participating falconers in 2021, 278 in 2023 and 119 last year. Fewer trappers in the channel can reflect tighter licensing or a leaner passage season; the center’s figures do not say which, and the difference matters to how the model is judged. The opening weeks of the seventh edition will show whether last year’s count was a floor or a step down.
The auction runs into the winter calendar that gives it purpose: the hunting season, the festivals and the competition purses that make a juvenile peregrine trapped in October worth training through November. The numbers to watch are the average price against last year’s SR160,000 and the count of trappers on the books. Both will say whether the Kingdom’s answer to an old trade, one open floor with the lights on, is holding its sellers as well as its buyers.