Its natural habitats are subtropical or tropical dry shrubland and subtropical or tropical dry lowland grassland.

The voice of the bird is a jumbled chirpy song and its call is canary like zeee-zsreee.

The bird favors semi-desert areas with thick patches of scrub on rocky hill sides, scattered trees in savannah type areas.

The yellow-throated seedeater was formerly placed in the genus Serinus but phylogenetic analysis using mitochondrial and nuclear DNA sequences found that the genus was polyphyletic.

[2] The genus was therefore split and a number of species including the yellow-throated seedeater were moved to the resurrected genus Crithagra.