The species is not tropical in any useful sense. It occupies conifer forest in the Sierra Madre Occidental, generally between about 1,500 and 3,000 metres, where winter snow is normal. Its heavy bill is a seed-extraction tool: the bird works into a green pine cone, levers the scales apart and removes the seeds, holding the cone in one foot.
Because pine cone crops vary sharply between years and ranges, flocks are nomadic, travelling considerable distances to find productive stands. That makes the species dependent on large connected tracts of mature forest rather than on any single site, and logging of old-growth pine has been the principal driver of its decline.
Birds ranged into the mountains of Arizona and New Mexico historically, and the last accepted records there date from the middle of the twentieth century. A reintroduction attempt in Arizona during the 1980s using confiscated birds did not establish a population, in part because released captives lacked flock knowledge of foraging areas and were heavily taken by predators.