Birds in Winter Conifers

     I lived outside Rohrerstown in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania when I was a child and youth during the late 1940's and early 1950's.  The area around our house was farmland, with a couple of 50 acre patches of deciduous woods.  A two-acre stand of Norway spruces and white pines was planted along the edge of one of the woodlots. 
     I was about eleven or twelve years old when I first visited that patch of conifers in winter with snow on the tree limbs and the ground.  The trees were about twelve feet tall and the whole coniferous patch smelled of that wonderful piney scent.  As I  walked among those fragrant evergreen trees in the cold, damp air, several small, gray birds with white outer tail feathers flitted ahead of me, while chipping rapidly and trilling, and disappearing in the shadows of the needled boughs where they were still vocal.  With my interest peaked, I approached those birds hidden among coniferous branches.  And, as before, they flew ahead of me, chirping all the while and vanishing again in coniferous shadows.
     Those little birds were dark-eyed juncos, which are members of the seed-and-insect-eating sparrow family.  Juncos are dark-gray above like a winter sky and white below like snow on the ground.  They nest farther north and down the higher mountains of the Appalachians to the Smoky Mountains.  They only winter in Lancaster County, where they inhabit patches of evergreens in suburban areas, and elsewhere, near patches of weeds.  They eat the seeds of those plants in winter.
     Another winter day, about the same period of time as the one written about above, but a little later, I was walking in that same patch of conifers.  Again juncos fluttered ahead of me and disappeared into needled shadows, chipping and trilling all the while.
     But this time I also heard the muffled thumping of wings against needled branches in the tops of the conifers, and showers of snow dropping to the ground.  There were bigger birds in those trees; up to a dozen of them I estimated as they flew from one tree top to another.  When I finally got good looks at a couple of them, I saw they were owls, with tall feather tufts on their heads, standing upright on needled limbs.  I stood still, then backed away from them so not to disturb them any more.   
     Sometime later I was able to identify them as long-eared owls, so-named for those long feather tufts.  Like the juncos, long-ears also breed farther north and only winter in this part of Pennsylvania.  They hole up in dense stands of coniferous trees during the day here in winter and hunt for mice across neighboring fields at night.  They are sometimes spotted roosting in evergreens by finding their compact, regurgitated pellets of mouse fur and bones on the ground beneath their roosts. 
     Stands of young or half-grown evergreens in winter can be interesting with birds such as the juncos and long-ears.  One has only to get out and walk among those trees.