The bar-bellied cuckooshrike was described by the French polymath Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon in 1775 in his Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux.

[2] The bird was also illustrated in a hand-coloured plate engraved by François-Nicolas Martinet in the Planches Enluminées D'Histoire Naturelle which was produced under the supervision of Edme-Louis Daubenton to accompany Buffon's text.

[3] Neither the plate caption nor Buffon's description included a scientific name but in 1783 the Dutch naturalist Pieter Boddaert coined the binomial name Corvus striatus in his catalogue of the Planches Enluminées.

[4] Buffon believed that his specimen had come from New Guinea but the species does not occur there; the type locality has been designated as the island of Luzon in the Philippines.

The cup nest is built on the fork of a tree and is made of mosses, lichens, leaves, rootlets,[16] and possibly mud.

Its global population appears to be decreasing because of habitat destruction, but not rapidly, so the IUCN Red List has assessed it as a least-concern species.