If you like birds , wait till spring to cut back your coneflowers! Like a lot of people in the fall I would go through my planting beds and cut back and clean-up  the perennial areas before winter . This included a nice patch of coneflowers next to a large window in our family room. For a few years now i,m thankful that my wife convinced me to leave the coneflowers in place. She insisted that if I left them, that gold  finches would visit the spent flower heads to get the  seeds out.This has been the case! Many times during the winter months we’ve had the pleasure of watching these birds expertly extract coneflower seed. If you can push off cutting back your coneflowers till spring , You will probably have a feathered friend thanking you on a cold snowy winters day.  Brian Richardson