Diet and Foraging

True to its name, the main fare of the Puerto Rican Lizard-Cuckoo includes lizards (mostly tree lizards, Anolis spp.) and other small animal matter, including large spiders, insects, stick bugs, and caterpillars (Leck 1972, Raffaele et al. 1998, Mowbray 2010). Danforth (1931) recorded the contents of five stomachs of Puerto Rican Lizard-Cuckoos and found Anolis lizards (in three stomachs), lizard eggs, a spingid caterpillar, other unidentified caterpillars, a large walking stick, centipedes, a cerambycid beetle (Solenoptera thomae), other unidentified animal matter, and a piece of white quartz gravel in one stomach. There also is one record of a lizard-cuckoo eating a coqui frog (Eleutherodactylus spp.; Perez-Rivera 1997).

Foraging substrates include understory and upperstory in a pine plantation near Luquillo, though upperstory foraging was used more often (Cruz 1988). Foraging maneuvers of the species are described by Cruz (1988) as upperstory foliage glean predominantly, but other maneuvers include understory glean (33%), canopy foliage probe (defined as "removal of prey item by penetrating substrate"; 10%), ground glean (8%), and canopy wood probe (5%; based on 35 observations of the species).