Driving the Welsh Mountains

     For about an hour and a half early in November, I drove through part of the Welsh Mountains, a peninsula of wooded hills jutting into a sea of farmland in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.  My goal on this little trip near home was to see what nature was stirring and visible.
     Since most of the deciduous leaves had fallen from their trips and were crisply carpeting the forest floors, I could better see the still green foliage and twisted limbs of mountain laurel shrubbery.  Those leaves will stay green all winter and into next spring.  Most of the laurel bushes were six feet tall or shorter, which is about average for this woody species.  Late in May and into early June these wild shrubs are spangled with many pale-pink flowers.  Most people who build homes in local woods recognize the beauties of mountain laurel limbs and blossoms and don't remove those shrubs from the lawns they create in the woods.   
     Driving by a hundred-yard-long ditch along a road in Welsh Mountain woods, I saw a few wild winter-berry bushes loaded with red berries.  Winter-berry shrubs do well in constantly moist ground.  And American robins and other kinds of birds eat many of their berries during their spring migrations north.  
     Winter-berries are planted on lawns for the beauty of their berries.  But each neighborhood must have one male shrub to a few or several female bushes for the females to develop the scarlet berries.  Pollen from the male bush flowers spreads on the wind to the female blooms, fertilizing them.
     To my surprise, I saw barberry bushes in a row about one hundred and fifty yards long and around 20 yards in from another rural road.  They were impressive.  I had never before seen so many barberry bushes in one place. 
     Those many barberry shrubs must have been planted and were now strikingly loaded with thousands and thousands of red berries.  This winter those prickly barberries will provide food and cover for many birds of several kinds, including northern mockingbirds, robins, eastern bluebirds, cedar waxwings and others.
     I saw a few domestic animals as I drove through the Welsh Mountains.  One place I spotted nine mostly-grown bantam hens crossing a country road to scratch up and feed on invertebrates and seeds on the other side.  I drove slowly to avoid hitting them and noticed how petite and pretty they were.
     At another spot near the road, I saw a half-dozen young long-horned cattle grazing in a pasture.  Though they were only half-grown, they already had long, picturesque horns that make a person stop to look closer.
     Along another road in the Welsh Mountains, I saw several small birds fly up from a roadside shoulder.  I eased to a stop near where those birds were and waited in my car.  As long as conditions were peaceful and they didn't see the human figure, the birds will be back.  There was no traffic on that road and, sure enough, they soon started coming close to where I was parked along the road.
     The summary of small birds I saw along that country road was over a hundred dark-eyed juncos eating grass seed from the ground on the road's shoulder.  These are gray, little birds on top and white below, with a white tail feather on each side of the tail that looks like a V when they fly. 
     A couple of song sparrows were eating seeds with the juncos on the ground.  Song sparrows are brown with darker streaking and quite common in this area.
     Meanwhile, a couple dozen white-throated sparrows were scratching among the dead and fallen leaves for seeds and invertebrates a few yards into the woods near where the juncos were.  Being sparrows, they were brown with darker streaking and a white throat patch.  Like the juncos, white-throats nest farther north and spend winters in Lancaster County, and through much of the eastern United States.  And like juncos and all other sparrow species, white-throats are hard to see because of their camouflaged feathering.        
     Just off that same road I was parked on, I noticed a pair of northern cardinals eating multiflora rose berries and a dozen American goldfinches consuming weed seeds on the top of five-foot-tall stems near the road.  Obviously, some of the birds were feeding on the ground while other species were eating berries and seeds above the soil.  Because of their reducing competition for food, more species of birds in greater numbers can live in any one place. 
     When outside, one can almost always count on seeing something of interest in nature.  Nature is always inspiring wherever the reader may be.