Méridien · A field guide to falconry in the UAE

This birdhas a passport.

A real one. Dark green, numbered, issued by a ministry. In the United Arab Emirates a falcon is not cargo and not quite a pet. It is a documented traveller with paperwork, a seat on the plane and a hospital of its own.

Open the passport

Page 01 · Identity

The world's first bird passport

In 2002, the UAE became the first country to issue passports to falcons.¹ Each dark-green booklet is produced by the Ministry of Climate Change and Environment and records the bird's species, country of origin and permit number.

The document is not a joke and not a souvenir. Peregrine, saker and gyrfalcon are all protected under CITES, the convention that regulates trade in endangered species. A falcon crossing a border normally needs a fresh CITES permit for every trip; a passport-holding falcon does not. Register the bird once, and it can travel with its owner for years of hunting seasons.³

The passport exists because falcons are valuable enough to smuggle. Wild-caught birds used to move across borders in car trunks and hand luggage; a registry with photographs, ring numbers and stamped travel history makes a trafficked bird much harder to launder into the legal market.⁴

28,000+

falcon passports issued by the UAE between 2002 and 2013, the most recent public count²

HOLDER · حامل الجواز

United Arab Emirates · Falcon Passport

Type: P (Falcon)
Species: Falco cherrug (Saker)
Sex: F
Country of origin: United Arab Emirates
Ring no.: AE-04-1372
Issuing authority: Ministry of Climate Change & Environment
Date of issue: 14 SEP 2023
Valid until: 13 SEP 2026

A reconstruction based on published descriptions of the MOCCAE falcon passport, not a scan of a real document.

Page 02 · Entries & exits

Seat 11F is a falcon

The passport matters because falcons actually travel. Hunting season takes Emirati falconers to Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan and Morocco, and the birds fly commercial.

Etihad Airways, the national carrier of the UAE, allows falcons in the cabin. The rules read like they were written by a patient lawyer with a perch in the office: one falcon may travel on its own economy seat, hooded and tethered; a second bird needs an extra seat, from around $500. In business class, two falcons per guest are allowed.⁵

A falcon travelling on its owner's baggage allowance flies free. Meanwhile the airline's fee for a cat or a small dog in the cabin is about $1,500 per flight.⁶

Falcon seating chart

How Etihad boards a bird of prey: hooded, tethered, and never on the emergency exit row.

Falcon seat
Falconer
Second falcon · extra seat from ~$500

Dog in the cabin

$1,500

Falcon in the cabin

Etihad in-cabin fees, 2025. The falcon travels within the standard baggage allowance; the dog pays the pet-in-cabin rate.⁶

Page 03 · Specifications

The equipment page

Every passport has a page describing its holder. This holder happens to be the fastest animal ever recorded.

The fastest thing with a heartbeat

In level flight a peregrine cruises at a modest 65–90 km/h. The record happens in the dive. In 1999, a falconry peregrine named Frightful was clocked at 389.46 km/h in a stoop; the measurement came from a skydiving falconer who jumped alongside her.⁷ No Formula 1 car has gone that fast in a race.

Top recorded speeds, km/h

Usain Bolt, sprint 100 m world record pace
44.70
Cheetah, flat sprint fastest land animal
103
Skydiver, belly-down typical terminal velocity
195
Formula 1, race record Bottas, Mexico 2016
372.50
Peregrine falcon, dive “Frightful”, 1999
389.46

Guinness World Records; Britannica. Comparison speeds are published records for each category.

Eyes measured in kilometres

A falcon's visual acuity is estimated at 20/5 to 20/2: what you can make out from two metres, the bird reads from twenty. That is roughly 2.6 times sharper than a human eye, sharp enough to pick out a pigeon at three kilometres.⁸

Each falcon eye has two foveae, two spots of maximum sharpness, where a human eye has one. One looks forward and works like a gunsight for the final strike; the other looks sideways and scans the horizon while the bird circles.

What the falcon sees

Your eye

a bird, probably

Falcon eye

a pigeon, in detail

Distance to pigeon

1.2 km

Drag the slider: a pigeon at this distance, through your eyes and through a falcon's.

Who gets the passport

Peregrine
Falco peregrinus
the record-holding diver
Saker
Falco cherrug
the desert classic of Arab falconry
Gyrfalcon
Falco rusticolus
the largest and most expensive

Three species dominate Gulf falconry, plus purpose-bred hybrids sized for heat, speed or endurance.

Page 04 · Medical record

Eleven thousand patients, all of them falcons

On 3 October 1999, Abu Dhabi opened the world's first hospital exclusively for falcons. It is still the largest.

11,000
patients a year⁹
110,000+
patients since 1999⁹
200+
birds in air-conditioned rooms⁹

The Abu Dhabi Falcon Hospital treats around 11,000 birds a year and has seen more than 110,000 since opening. The building holds individual air-conditioned rooms for over 200 birds, an ophthalmology unit, endoscopy, surgery, pedicures for talons and a round-the-clock ambulance service.⁹ Falcon passports are issued on site, which makes it the only hospital we know of with a passport office in the lobby.

Since 2007 the hospital has also run daily tours for humans, who queue to watch the patients get their feathers fixed.¹⁰

Procedure · Imping

The feather transplant

01
The break
A falcon's flight depends on every primary feather. A snapped feather means lost speed and lost symmetry; for a hunting bird, that is a grounding injury.
02
The donor
Hospitals keep archives of moulted feathers. A matching donor feather is selected from a previous moult: same species, same wing, same position, sometimes the same bird.
03
The pin
A thin pin of bamboo or carbon fibre is glued into the hollow shaft of both feather halves, splicing the donor onto the stump. Feathers are dead keratin, like hair: the bird feels nothing.
04
The paper trail
The method is not new. Emperor Frederick II described imping in his falconry treatise De arte venandi cum avibus around the 1240s. The hospital just swapped his materials for carbon fibre.¹¹

Page 05 · Declared value

The million-dirham bird

What is a falcon worth? At the 2022 Abu Dhabi International Hunting and Equestrian Exhibition, a pure-white American gyrfalcon sold for 1.01 million dirhams, about $275,000. It remains the most expensive bird in the fair's history.¹²

That was not even the world record. A year earlier, a white gyrfalcon went for $466,667 at a breeders' auction in Saudi Arabia.¹³ Below the headline birds, the market has a full price ladder: gyrfalcons and gyr hybrids typically trade between $10,000 and $35,000, sakers and peregrines for less. Nearly all of it now comes with pedigree papers, because the market has moved to captive-bred birds with traceable bloodlines.¹⁵

The market has a trade fair to match. ADIHEX 2024 drew 347,481 visitors and 1,742 exhibitors from 65 countries: the largest event of its kind in the Middle East.¹⁴

Record falcon sales, USD

Typical saker / peregrine market price, captive-bred
up to ~$10K
Typical gyrfalcon / hybrid market price, captive-bred
$10–35K
ADIHEX record · white gyrfalcon Abu Dhabi, 2022
$275K
World record · white gyrfalcon Saudi breeders' auction, 2021
$466,667

Auction records versus the everyday market. Dirham and riyal prices converted at contemporary rates.

Emirati Times; Al Arabiya; UAE Stories market guide

Page 06 · Conservation

Hunt, breed, release, repeat

A sport that once drained wild populations now runs as a closed loop: the hunters are bred in captivity, the prey is bred in captivity, and the wild birds go back to the wild.

Since 1995, the Sheikh Zayed Falcon Release Programme has taken falcons at the end of their hunting careers, along with birds confiscated from smugglers, rehabilitated them and returned them to migration routes in Central Asia. By May 2025 the count stood at 2,355 sakers and peregrines released.¹⁶

The prey side is bigger. The houbara bustard, the falcon's traditional quarry, is bred at industrial scale by the International Fund for Houbara Conservation: more than 888,200 birds bred and over 534,000 released into the wild across the UAE, Morocco and Kazakhstan.¹⁷ Captive-bred falcons hunt captive-bred houbara, and pressure comes off both wild populations.

The falconry loop

How the UAE closed the cycle: breeding supplies the sport, the sport funds the breeding, and the wild populations sit outside the loop.

2,355
falcons returned to the wild since 1995¹⁶
534,000+
houbara bustards released¹⁷

Page 07 · Heritage

Twenty-four countries, one bird

In 2010, falconry entered UNESCO's list of intangible cultural heritage as an 11-country nomination led by the UAE. Even then it was the largest joint nomination ever filed. In December 2021 the UAE led it again: 24 countries, the largest multinational element on the entire list.¹⁸

2010

11 countries

first inscription, led by the UAE

2021

24 countries

re-inscription, the list's largest element

The tradition the paperwork protects is older than the state. Sheikh Zayed, the founding president of the UAE, was a falconer his whole life and wrote a book about it in 1976, Falconry as a Sport: Our Arab Heritage.²⁰ The sport he grew up with has since acquired stadium infrastructure: the President's Cup in Abu Dhabi, and Dubai's Fazza championships, where falcons sprint a 400-metre track for a prize pool of 2.8 million dirhams.²²

Even tradition updates its methods. Since 2010, competition falcons have trained against remote-controlled aircraft and drone-towed lures instead of live prey. The bedouin sport now flies against robots.²²

Falconry on the UNESCO heritage list

United Arab Emirates
Belgium
Czechia
France
Republic of Korea
Mongolia
Morocco
Qatar
Saudi Arabia
Spain
Syria
Austria
Hungary
Germany
Italy
Kazakhstan
Pakistan
Portugal
Croatia
Ireland
Kyrgyzstan
Netherlands
Poland
Slovakia

The 2021 re-inscription, led by the UAE, spans 24 countries from Ireland to Mongolia. No other element on the list covers more. Shown here the way a falcon would collect them: as stamps. UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, element 01708

Page 08 · Endorsements

Sources

Every figure in this story is drawn from the public record. Where a number has no single official source (such as the hospital's room count), we use the formulation its own materials use.