 Its natural habitats are temperate forests, subtropical or tropical moist shrubland, and temperate grassland.It is a very rare vagrant to Europe, but like several related Asiatic rosefinches is reasonably frequent in the cage-bird trade so many records have been considered to relate to escapes.The long-tailed rosefinch was formerly placed in the genus "Uragus" but was moved to "Carpodacus" based on the results of phylogenetic analyses of mitochondrial and nuclear DNA sequences.