This species comprises several subspecies found throughout much of Australasia and the south-west Pacific region, including the Philippines (where it is known as tikling), New Guinea, Australia, New Zealand (where it is known as the banded rail, or moho-pererū in Māori),[2] and numerous smaller islands, covering a range of latitudes from the tropics to the subantarctic.

In 1760 the French zoologist Mathurin Jacques Brisson described and illustrated the buff-banded rail in his multi-volume Ornithologie based on a specimen collected in the Philippines.

[4] When in 1766 the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus updated his Systema Naturae for the twelfth edition he added 240 species that had been previously described by Brisson in his Ornithologie.

[6] Numerous subspecies are recognised for the buff-banded rail because of repeated dispersion of birds to islands in the Pacific, often followed by founder effects and reduced potential for gene flow.

[8] The buff-banded rail is an omnivorous scavenger which feeds on a range of terrestrial invertebrates and small vertebrates, seeds, fallen fruit and other vegetable matter, as well as carrion and refuse.