Mongolian Finch

The Mongolian, or Mongolian trumpeter, finch is a small finch with a large head and a short, thick greyish-yellow bill. In breeding plumage males have a pink flush to the face and underparts, with extensive white and pink areas in the wings, a pattern also present but less marked in non-breeding plumage. It is a resident from eastern Turkey across the Caucasus, east into Central Asia and on to western China and Mongolia and south into Kashmir, native to Afghanistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, China, Pakistan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, India, Nepal, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkey and Uzbekistan (Wikipedia, general species account).

It is fairly quiet outside the breeding season, with various rising nasal notes and chirrups, its songs a jumbled series of these notes, and it favours mountainous stony desert or semi-arid scrub and rocky slopes for breeding. SoIB 2023 lists it as a resident of alpine and cold desert that eats plants and seeds, without a priority category (Wikipedia, general species account; SoIB 2023).