As the English and scientific names suggest, these are high-altitude species, found in the mountain ranges of southern Eurasia, from the Pyrenees east to the Himalayas, Tibet and western China.

Snowfinches are not migratory but may move to lower altitudes or human habitation in winter, when these highly gregarious birds form large flocks.

That was done by J. Verreaux, and thus many erroneously attributed authorship of the genus to him, although as per the ICZN Code Article 69.3. he technically just fixed its type species as the small snowfinch.

Bonaparte merely remarked it had been used by "some" (aliquī) unspecified authors,[13] while many subsequent sources attributed it to Johann Jakob Kaup.

Thus, in the case of Orospiza Bonaparte is again the valid author, though Thomas Horsfield and Frederic Moore were the first to set a type species.

First proposed for the long-tailed tit (Aegithalos caudatus) in Moehring's Geslachten der Vogelen in 1758, that widely ignored work was suppressed as a source of taxa by the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature in 1987.

Consequently, later attempts to re-establish that name as a junior synonym of Aegithalos are preempted by the erection of Orites for the white-winged snowfinch by Eugen von Keyserling and Johann Heinrich Blasius in 1840.

[15] And finally, Onychostruthus had to be established because Onychospiza, Nikolai Przhevalsky's 1876 name for the proposed monotypic genus of the white-rumped snowfinch, was preoccupied.

It had been given by Rey to the chestnut-eared bunting (today Emberiza fucata) in 1872 already, as an unnecessary correction – and thus junior objective synonym – of Bonaparte's original Onychospina.