Today, November 3rd, I was driving through the wooded Welsh Mountains about a mile and a half south of New Holland, Pennsylvania.  It is a warm, sunny day with blue skies and the remnant of colored leaves; a god day to be outside exploring nature.  Dead, red, yellow and brown leaves fell constantly from deciduous trees and planted, tall Norway spruce and white pine trees emerged from the falling veil of foliage.  Meanwhile, the forest floors became ever more covered with carpets of dead, crispy leaves. 
     As I stood and marveled at the autumn leaf beauties for a couple of hours that morning, several creatures came into my view, but not all at once.  A group of about six turkey vultures and around eight black vultures flapped and soared overhead for several minutes as they sought a thermal of warmed air that would carry them up and up and away in the sky.  Those vultures roosted overnight somewhere in the forests of the Welsh Mountains, but are now getting airborne to soar over nearby cropland to look for dead animals to eat.  Excitingly, as I watched the circling vultures, I saw an immature bald eagle float by, fairly low, on huge, flat wings.
     Since I was relatively still and quiet, I began to see gray squirrels gathering nuts for the winter and a flock of about a dozen sparrow-sized, dark-eyed juncos eating weed seeds along the road I was on in the woods.  I was amused to see a red-tailed hawk circling above the trees tops and thought those squirrels need to be careful with that hawk around. 
     About the time I saw the red-tail on high, the juncos suddenly zipped into roadside shrubs and disappeared.  Within a second I saw a hawk abruptly land on a fallen tree near where the juncos were.  Through my 16 power binoculars, I saw the hawk was a young, male sharp-shinned hawk.  That sharpy stood on the downed tree for a minute, then flew into a nearby tree, presumably to wait until the juncos forgot about him and came out to forage on weed and grass seeds again.  The hawk was camouflaged in the tree and maybe the juncos wouldn't see him, allowing him to ambush one or more of them.
     Because it was early November, I saw many colorful berries of four kinds along the road in the woods, as in many other woodland edges, hedgerows and roadsides in this area in autumn.  Those berries add much color and beauty to those overgrown, human-made habitats in fall and winter.  There were red ones on deciduous multiflora rose bushes, bittersweet vines and staghorn sumac trees and pale-blue ones on coniferous red juniper trees.  Those berries will be food for white-footed mice, gray squirrels, flying squirrels, and such birds as flocks of American robins, eastern bluebirds, cedar waxwings, and individual northern mockingbirds and a few kinds of woodpeckers.  This winter I will enjoy visiting that berry-producing vegetation to experience their beautiful berries and the birds that eat many of them.  The birds will ingest the berries, digest the pulp, but pass many of their seeds in their droppings across the countryside, thus spreading those plants far and wide.
     Staghorn sumacs are interesting little, native trees.  They have compound leaves that produce several leaflets that turn red in October or before and flutter in autumn winds like banners.  They produce fuzzy-covered, red berries in pyramid-shaped clumps on the tops of their twigs.  And many of those decorative berries stay on their twigs through much of the winter when they can be admired.
     Most any day any time of year is a good day to be outdoors.  There one can enjoy and be inspired by the beauties and intrigues of nature.