The Stripe-faced Wood-Quail is a ground-dwelling quail of humid Andean forests and their upper margins. It is secretive and forages on the ground.
It has a brown body marked with black and white spots, a rufous crest, and a black stripe through the eye.
Stripe-faced Wood-quails inhabit mountain forests from south-eastern Peru to northern Bolivia. They have rufous crowns and distinctive white diamond-shaped marks across the breast. Far to the north, Black-fronted Wood-quails of Colombia and Venezuela share these plumage features.
A study published in 2022 compared thousands of DNA regions to investigate relationships among New World quails. Stripe-faced and Black-fronted Wood-quails were recovered as sister species, sharing a close branch of the evolutionary tree. Earlier groupings based on plumage had placed them in separate groups.
Stripe-faced Wood-quail samples included tissue from Puno, Peru, and a museum specimen collected in Cochabamba, Bolivia, in 1956. Preserved material helped reveal connections between birds now living in distant mountain forests.
IUCN Red List (BirdLife listing) · Least Concern · Global
BirdLife’s 2024 global assessment lists Least Concern. It treats the species as highly dependent on forest and suspects a slow decline from forest loss combined with hunting. Retaining humid mountain forest and establishing local population and hunting conditions support conservation.