This South American bird flies out at night to find fruit and rests in caves or rainforest canopies. It regurgitates fruit seeds and carries them through the forest.
Its plumage is reddish brown, with white mottling on the chest, upper wing coverts and edges of the undertail. The long tail has light black barring. Males tend to be slightly larger and greyer than females.
It feeds entirely on fruit and leaves its cave at night to forage. It swallows fruit whole, digests the pulp and later regurgitates the seeds, helping move them to other parts of the forest.
It builds a cave-ledge nest from regurgitated seeds, fruit fibres and droppings, laying two to four eggs. Both parents incubate for about 30–35 days and share brooding and feeding.
At Trinidad cave roosts it echolocates with bursts of clicks. In the 2012 recordings, birds leaving in moonlight produced softer bursts with fewer clicks than birds flying in darkness.
During October 2007 tracking in northeastern Venezuela, birds leaving the cave sometimes spent the day roosting in forest trees before returning on later nights.
Long bristles surround its large hooked bill, and its feet and toes are pale pink.
An extinction-risk assessment has not been added yet.