Price discovery in the Saudi falcon season opened this year with imported birds. At the opening auction of the International Saudi Falcons and Hunting Exhibition at Malham, north of Riyadh, two saker falcons from Mongolia sold for a combined SR550,000, about $147,000: SR150,000 for a young bird and SR400,000 for an adult, according to figures reported by Akhbaar24 and carried by Arab News on Sunday.
The exhibition, which runs through 10 October, has given Mongolian falcons a dedicated section for the second successive year. The saker is prized among Saudi falconers for its size, broad wingspan and endurance, and the supply line behind Sunday’s sale is older than the exhibition itself: Saudi buyers have imported sakers from Mongolia since the 1990s, a corridor that predates most of the formal institutions now organizing the sport. One early count, cited by International Wildlife Consultants, put the trade at 116 falcons in 1997 alone.
The season runs on two auction channels with different economics, and the distinction matters for reading the prices. The exhibition floor trades imported and captive-bred birds, available immediately, with provenance on paper. The National Center for Falcons’ wild-bird auction, in its seventh edition and open through 30 November, handles only migratory juvenile peregrines trapped inside the Kingdom under license, and its results arrive bird by bird over two months rather than in one evening. Last season that channel sold 40 falcons at an average near SR160,000. An adult saker at SR400,000 belongs to a different market from that average: a proven bird of a prized type, bought without the wait, at the top of the import trade.
The wider season gives the sale its context. Last year’s exhibition drew more than 700,000 visitors and recorded over SR91 million in sales of equipment, vehicles and outdoor supplies, by the organizers’ count. The Melwah race opened its card on Sunday, twelve heats through 9 October with SR723,000 in prize money paid to the top five finishers in each heat. The wild auction’s six-year ledger, SR45.3 million across 455 falcons, describes a market tightening at the top: 102 birds sold in 2020 and 40 last season, while the average price climbed from roughly SR98,000 toward SR160,000. Fewer birds, dearer birds, and a documented premium for the wild channel.
An opening sale of two lots is a data point, not a season. But it answers the first of the questions the season opened with: demand at the top of the market arrived before the main harvest did. Whether Sunday’s hammer reads as a ceiling or a floor now depends on the wild-peregrine results as trappers and the migration deliver them, and on whether the premium at the top of the import market extends to the domestic channel that the center has spent six years building into a documented, capped trade.
The Melwah podium at the end of the week will put numbers on the performance side of the sport, and the auction floor will keep its own ledger through November. By then the opening hammer will look either early or cheap.