Diet and Foraging

There is no information on the diet of Scaled Ground-Cuckoo. Its diet presumably is similar to that other species of Neomorphus, which are primarily insectivorous but also consume some small vertebrates and seeds.

Similar to other species of Neomorphus, Scaled Ground-Cuckoo attends swarms of army ants in order to capture prey that is flushed from the undergrowth as the ants move through it (Willis 1982, Lees et al. 2103).

Scaled Ground-Cuckoo also has been observed in association with White-lipped Peccaries (Tayassu pecari) at Vitória do Xingu, Pará, Brazil (Gonçalves-Castro and Silva-Castilho 2015). It has been suggested, in relation to other species of Neomorphus, that this behavior is beneficial to the cuckoos because the peccaries disturb potential prey items as they forage (López-Lanús et al. 1999).