Catch, Fly, Release: How Gulf Falconers Became the World's Quiet Conservationists

The Bedouin practice of returning a falcon to the wild each spring, and how it scaled into a modern conservation movement

There's an assumption people sometimes make about falconry from the outside: that hunting with a wild animal and protecting that animal's population are naturally in tension. Gulf falconry's actual history says the opposite. The tradition's oldest practice — catching a wild falcon each autumn and releasing it again each spring — was, functionally, a conservation mechanism, centuries before anyone in the region would have used that word to describe it.

An old practice with a modern name

The traditional cycle was straightforward and, from a conservation standpoint, remarkably sound. A falconer trapped a passage bird during autumn migration, trained and hunted with it through the cooler months, and released it back into the wild in spring, timed to coincide with the breeding season. The bird returned to the wild population able to breed, and the falconer began the following season with a newly trapped bird rather than an ageing captive one.

This wasn't designed as conservation policy. It reflected the practical limits of the time — no infrastructure existed for keeping birds comfortably through a Gulf summer, and there was no reason to try when the migration would simply bring more birds through the following autumn. But the effect, sustained over centuries and across an entire falconer population, kept pressure on wild raptor populations far lower than an equivalent hunting tradition built around permanent captivity would have.

Where the pressure actually came from

As falconry grew in popularity and scale through the twentieth century, and as international demand for exceptional birds increased, the balance that had held for centuries came under genuine strain. Wild capture at a larger scale, combined with illegal trade in wild-caught birds and eggs, put real pressure on saker and peregrine populations across their migratory range — a serious enough problem that it eventually required a coordinated response rather than reliance on traditional practice alone.

The response that followed reflects how seriously the issue has been taken across the region. The United Arab Emirates has committed substantial funding toward raptor conservation initiatives, including efforts to retrofit power infrastructure specifically to reduce raptor deaths from collisions and electrocution — a threat that has nothing to do with falconry directly but affects the same wild populations falconers depend on. Saudi Arabia has adopted international conventions governing the protection of falcons and other migratory birds, and enforcement against illegal wild capture and trade has tightened considerably compared to previous decades.

Captive breeding as the modern equivalent

The clearest structural shift has been the move toward captive breeding as the primary source of falcons for both hunting and competition, replacing wild capture almost entirely in a formal, regulated context. Where the old tradition managed pressure on wild populations by releasing birds each spring, the modern approach manages it by removing the need to capture wild birds at all for most falconers' purposes.

This shift has been significant enough to change the basic economics of the sport. High-quality captive-bred birds, including sophisticated hybrids bred specifically for hunting or competition performance, are now widely available through established breeding operations, reducing the incentive that once existed for illegal wild trapping. It's a rare example of a conservation goal and a practical market solution pointing in the same direction.

Saudi Arabia's HADAD programme

One of the more deliberate efforts to actively rebuild wild populations, rather than simply reduce pressure on them, is the HADAD programme launched by the Saudi Falcons Club in 2020. The programme works by taking captive-bred falcons donated by breeders and releasing them into areas where wild populations need additional breeding stock — a structured, modern version of the old release ethic, but aimed specifically at strengthening wild numbers rather than simply returning an individual bird that had already done its work for the season.

Programmes like this represent something worth noting: an industry built around a hunting tradition actively investing resources in rebuilding the wild population of the same species it depends on. That's not a common pattern across hunting traditions generally, and it reflects an ethic that traces directly back to the original catch-and-release practice, formalised and scaled through institutions that didn't exist a century ago.

The quarry side of the equation

Conservation in Gulf falconry isn't limited to the falcons themselves. The houbara bustard, the tradition's most significant historical quarry species, came under enough pressure from hunting across its range that dedicated breeding and release programmes, including work by the International Fund for Houbara Conservation, have become essential to keeping wild populations viable at all. Protecting the falcon while allowing its traditional prey to disappear would have hollowed out the tradition just as thoroughly as the reverse, and the region's conservation efforts have generally treated both sides of that relationship as connected rather than separate problems.

An inheritance worth the name

What ties all of this together — the old release ethic, the modern breeding programmes, the habitat and infrastructure investment — is a consistent thread running from the earliest Bedouin falconer to the conservation institutions operating today. The tradition was never built around extracting as much as possible from a wild population. It was built around a partnership that, by necessity, had to be sustainable to continue at all.

Modern conservation programmes in Saudi Arabia and the UAE aren't a departure from that history so much as its natural continuation, carried out with considerably more resources and considerably better science than were available to the falconers who first worked out, through hard experience, that a tradition worth keeping had to leave something behind for the next season.