The Afghan snowfinch (Pyrgilauda theresae) or the Afghan ground-sparrow, bar-tailed snowfinch, Meinertzhagen's snowfinch, or Theresa's snowfinch, is a passerine bird of the sparrow family Passeridae, endemic to the northern parts of the Hindu Kush mountains in Afghanistan. There are no major threats to the species despite its restricted range, so it is assessed as least concern on the IUCN Red List. This species is mostly a seed-eater, supplementing its diet with some insects. It builds its nest in the burrows or hollows of ground-dwelling rodents, lined with hair or feathers. Taxonomy and systematics This species was first scientifically recorded relatively late, by Richard Meinertzhagen on a 1937 expedition with Salim Ali. Meinertzhagen formally described the species in Bulletin of the British Ornithologists' Club paper later that year, and gave it the binomial name Montifringilla theresae. He reported that he collected the type specimen of the species in the Shibar Pass, between Bamyan and Kabul. The name he gave the species was after his cousin and companion, Theresa Clay, an expert on bird lice. While Meinertzhagen described several dozen species and subspecies (including others named after Clay), he was later found to have stolen specimens and falsified records, and this may be the only verifiably genuine taxon he described. Meinertzhagen placed this species in the genus Montifringilla, which some classifications continue to place it in, along with about eight species of 'snowfinches'. Among these species, it is most similar to Blanford's snowfinch, which has similar plumage and essentially the same nesting habits. Some authors split this species, Blanford's snowfinch, and the other snowfinches of southern and central Asia as the genus Pyrgilauda, on the basis that their morphological traits, as well as habitat and ecology, are substantially different. (This is an arbitrary distinction, as there can be little doubt that Montifringilla in the broad sense is monophyletic.) One of the more prominent works to follow this classification recently, the Handbook of the Birds of the World, called the species of their genus Pyrgilauda 'ground-sparrows', on account of their different habitat and behaviour from the northern 'snowfinches'. No subspecies have been described. Description It is long, weighing . The wingspan ranges from , and bills measure from . Females are slightly smaller on average than males. The male is grey-brown with some white in the wings and a black face-mask and two-pronged patch on the throat. The female is a buff-tinged brown,