It is native to southern and eastern Australia and is an example of convergent evolution as it is only distantly related to the European choughs that it closely resembles in shape, and for which it was named.

[7] The mudnest builder family Corcoracidae itself is now placed in a narrower 'Core corvine' group, which contains the crows and ravens, shrikes, birds of paradise, fantails, monarch flycatchers, and drongos.

Flight is a mixture of a slow, deep flapping and short glides: unlike their European namesakes, white-winged choughs are not particularly strong or agile fliers and spend the great majority of their time on the ground, foraging methodically through leaf litter for worms, insects, grain, and snails in a loose group, walking with a distinctive swagger, and calling softly to one another every few seconds.

It eats a wide variety of arthropods, including centipedes, millipedes and many types of insect—beetles, cockroaches, termites, grasshoppers and crickets, flies, butterflies and moths, and ants, bees and wasps.

The nest is a deep cup-shaped structure made of grasses held together with mud or sometimes manure in a tree fork up to 10 metres above the ground.

[17] All members of a family take turns to incubate, preen, and feed youngsters, and all cooperate in defending the nest against predators.

However, the juveniles, who are highly inefficient foragers, have been observed to engage in deception; they bring food back to the nest and make to feed nestlings, but instead wait until unobserved, and then eat it themselves.

Young take six to seven months to reach independence – a significant time-span for birds – but they repay the long investment by returning to the nest the next year and helping raise the next generation.