In 1747 the English naturalist George Edwards included an illustration and a description of the white-bellied drongo in the second volume of his A Natural History of Uncommon Birds.

Edwards based his hand-coloured etching on a specimen that had been sent from Bengal to the silk-pattern designer Joseph Dandridge in London.

[2] When in 1758 the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus updated his Systema Naturae for the tenth edition, he placed the white-bellied drongo with the shrikes in the genus Lanius.

Linnaeus included a brief description, coined the binomial name Lanius caerulescens and cited Edwards' work.

[9][10][11] The species is believed to be closely related to Dicrurus leucophaeus[9] but has not be confirmed with molecular sequence studies.

They perch upright close to the tops of trees and capture insects in the air with short aerobatic sallies.

Two to four eggs, pale salmon coloured with reddish blotches on the broad end, are laid in the nest which may be 20 to 30 feet high in the fork of a tree.

[18] When mobbing they have been observed to imitate the alarm calls of squirrels or the mewing of a cat[19] and is known to join to mixed-species foraging flocks.