The underparts and lower back are a warm tawny-brown to orange-brown in colour with white wing coverts and black primaries.

E. C. Stuart Baker describes sclateri from the upper Chindwin to the Chin Hills and kinneari from southern Myanmar and northwest Thailand.

[4] The range of the rufous treepie is quite large, covering Pakistan, India and into Bangladesh, Myanmar, Laos, and Thailand.

[5] The rufous treepie is primarily an arboreal omnivore feeding on fruits, nectar (of Bombax ceiba[6]) seeds,[7] invertebrates, small reptiles and the eggs and young of birds;[8] it has also been known to take flesh from recently killed carcasses.

It is an agile forager, clinging and clambering through the branches and sometimes joining mixed hunting parties along with species such as drongos and babblers.

They are known to be a cleaning symbiont of deer, feeding on ectoparasites of sambar which permit them to perch and position themselves to invite the birds to examine specific parts.

[11] It is considered to be beneficial to palm cultivation in southern India due to its foraging on the grubs of the destructive weevil Rhynchophorus ferrugineus.