Diet and Foraging

Main food taken:

The Yellow-faced Grassquit almost exclusively feeds on various grasses including Paspalum sp., Digitaria adscendens, Eragrostris sp., and Panicum sp. (Skutch 1954, Rubenstein et al. 1974). The grass plant Paspalum sp. is highly favored and found to be the most energetically rich seed by both quadrat and weight, but the next most energetically rich seed, Digitaria adscendens, is more often selected (Rubenstein et al. 1977). When grass seeds become scarce, the Yellow-faced Grassquit also forages for berries and insects (Skutch 1954, Stiles and Skutch 1989). The birds pluck tiny white protein bodies from the base of the petioles of the Cecropia tree. These substances are favored by ants (Skutch 1954). Grassquits pluck seeds from inflorescence of tall grasses in addition to gathering seeds from the open ground (Stiles and Skutch 1989). This species also sips nectar from flowers (Restall et al. 2007).