The giant coua was described by the French polymath Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon in 1780 in his Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux.

[3] 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.

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

[9] As a member of the cuckoo family, they have a reversible third toe and resemble coucals in their method of scrambling through entangled vines for food.

[1][12] This summarizes the reasons for evaluating giant coua as least concern by the official Red List Authority for birds for IUCN.

[10] Recent sightings in Sainte Luce testify that the tail of the giant coua appears to be longer than in other regions (Ellis 2003).

Sainte Luce is currently one of the best areas to see these birds in certain forest fragments that should have long-term management to foster limited populations (Ellis 2003).