The managers at Mississinewa Lake hit a home run when they cut a half-mile trail through a pine woods for the annual foot-race. What a pleasant place to walk. I was actually sad to see the road. Three deer cut across the trail about forty yards in front of me, really loading up my sightings checklist. Throw in a pair of Cardinals, a couple of nuthatches, a bluejay, and call it a success.
In the woods, I was recalling my writing that cottontails were rare, and it occurred coyotes are rare, also. The populations are inextricably linked away from settled areas, as coyotes have become very successful scavengers (and first-rate cat harvesters). I only saw one last year: contrast with three fox, always more shy, reticent.
On the (closed) road, towards the car, what do I see but a coyote track.
I am no, not even, a tracker, and couldn't track a slow snake through wet paint.
Coyote prints are the same as a dog's, which you would expect, as they are genetically indistinguishable. But a dog makes side and side prints, while all four coyote paws fall in a straight line.
If hearing a bird call serves as a sighting, then I'll surely count coyote tracks in fresh snow.

Today is Sir Issac Newton's Birthday. He was the founder of all things physics, true genius, but all accounts I've read depict him as a weird fucker, so Happy B'Day, Ike.
The 2 greatest scientific discoveries of the (19)50's and 60's were J. Tuzo Wilson's explication of plate tectonics in 1964, and Watson and Crick's Double Helix of 1953. (Aside: Watson received his doctorate from Indiana University in zoology. Okay, WTF? I don't know what zoology is, but assume it's the study of zoos? I can see a BS in that, but a PhD in zoos? Fucking zoos? Only in Indiana.)
Contrary to my previous post, we are much better educated than I had presumed. Nearly 75% of Freshmen graduate High School. (The drop-out rate for teens aged 15 - 19 is only 6%. Something sinister is happening to 1 in 5 high schoolers.)
So I must assume everyone is familiar with the Double Helix. Watson and Crick, and a guy named Wilkins, shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962 for the model.
Largely ignored until rather recently was Rosiland Franklin. Watson and Crick had rendered several models of the structure. They used Franklin's radiological photographs (conveniently, without her permission) to identify the correct model.
Franklin died in 1958, aged 37, and, as the Nobel can only be awarded to the living, it was easy to ignore her contributions entirely.
That kind of crap would wear a soul to sand if one started finding each instance.

Okay, as sure as I am that most people are aware of the double helix, I am doubly certain that the vast majority of them cannot explain its significance.
Class?
Anyone?
The double helix provided the structure with which an entire yard (yep, three whole feet) of DNA pairs could be crammed into each and every cell in the human body.
There are anywhere from 10 trillion to 100 trillion cells in the human body (from subsequent Google replies), each with the complete human genome, the complete array of chromosome pairs. Each with three feet of DNA, and, if stretched, enough to make three round trips to the sun. Right there in little old you, and every one you know, except for conservatives, who lack a substantial amount of DNA coding for brain cells.
Without the Double Helix, there was no way to guess that the yard of DNA, which pioneer geneticists (well, maybe not Gregor Mendel, who starved an abbey full of monks growing sweet peas in the gardens) already had. But they could not posit how to get that damn much (again, three feet!) of the material in a single human cell. Into every human cell.
The Wright Brothers spent years carving wooden propellers, trying to find the right pitch for the blades to pull an aeroplane through the air. All trial and error. Hundreds of error.
Who knows when, if ever, Watson and Crick, and what's his name, would have found the correct of their models to pack three feet of DNA into a human cell? Paired, mind you, as every one knows the strands must be paired, for a single strand is just goo. Maybe years, maybe never, without the excellent crystallographic X-ray images prepared by Rosiland Franklin.
Rosiland Franklin never knew that Watson and Crick had access to her work.
Bastards.
As a footnote, this post also completely shortchanges Ms Franklin's work. For instance, she discovered there were two distinctly different strands of DNA, A and B, but could not put them together, could not pair them, without the double helix.
That was left to Watson and Crick, and that other guy, to steal her singular images and fit them to one of an array of models.
Crick has gone on to hell. Fuck Watson.