Adults have paler grey-blue upperparts than the peregrine falcon and often have a buff wash to the barred underparts, whereas the larger species has a whiter background colour.

[6] The Barbary falcon is native to parts of North and East Africa (Algeria, the Canary Islands, Egypt, Eritrea, Libya, Morocco, Niger, Nigeria, Sudan, Somalia and Tunisia), Palestine, Syria, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia.

Birds formerly included in the barbary falcon in central and southwest Asia, particularly in Afghanistan, westernmost China, the far north of India, Iran, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Oman, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, the United Arab Emirates and Uzbekistan are of the closely similar peregrine falcon subspecies F. p.

[2] It is a vagrant in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Djibouti, Greece, Italy, Kenya, Lebanon, Mali, Malta, Nepal, Portugal, Qatar, Senegal and Turkey.

The genetic distance is slight and the species form a close-knit and somewhat paraphyletic group in DNA sequence analyses, and all the major taxonomic authorities now consider it conspecific.

This scenario, by and large, parallels the proposed evolutionary history of the saker falcon in relation to the other hierofalcons; indeed, that group shows similar patterns of molecular paraphyly though it is of somewhat earlier origin.

A humerus some 9,000 years old (i.e., after the last ice age) from the Aswan area in Egypt, where Falco peregrinus minor occurs today, was identified as belonging to the peregrine falcon.

This case demonstrates that what makes a "species" is not only its descent, but also what happens to a population in the course of evolution, how it adapts and how this affects its reproductive isolation (or lack thereof) from sister taxa.