From Stowarzyszenie Ochrony Sów (Owl Conservation Association)
A church from Pomerania in Poland had an owl stuck inside for 3 days. It had eluded the people there and even the fire department. Finally the Owl Conservation Association was called in!
When Karol arrived, he was greeted with the Barn owl perched on a cross, I'm assuming the one in the photo. It did not want to be caught though, and despite being weak and hungry, it escaped behind the decorative organ pipes.
Karol and crew used thermal imaging goggles to track the owl behind the pipes, trying to direct it to people waiting to catch it and to keep it from getting stuck in the pipes.
They got it out from behind all that, but it still refused to be caught. The people spread out to block all the hard to access spots, and they moved in to herd the owl to a good place for capture.
Finally it was caught!
It was severely starved, but it was given food, comfort, and supervision, and quickly regained energy and bounced back well enough to be released the next day!
I blame the phlogiston.
I had never heard of phlogiston before this. Had a fun read on the history, and now I'm wondering what will be the phlogiston of this era.
Phlogiston is a great one. I mean we had aether theory, and we had phrenology, and we had Lamarckism (which, surprisingly enough, has had a comeback in recent decades, but interpreted and explained through the lens of evolutionary theory).
Honestly, likely things like dark matter or dark energy will be hot candidates for total revision in the coming decades, I think, but it's not really the same ideologically driven ad-hoc theorizing as, say, Lysenkoism, so I'm not sure.
We do have people actively refusing science, not even reverting it or believing outdated practices, but simply rejecting it as in the case of flat earthers ("flerfers"), and I think that is probably as close as you get today- except, with the previous ones, at least they came from actual scientific inquiries that turned out to be wrong, where FET is just random anti-scientific fundamentalism for no particular reason.
¯\(ツ)/¯
I always wonder about dark matter and quantum mechanics, mainly due to the fact that I can't get my brain to wrap around any of how the leading authorities talk about it, but even if they are right about it, we still know next to zip about it compared to other sciences, so that sounds like a good candidate for us to be very wrong about.
And I don't look down on the ignorance we have of things beyond our comprehension, it's actually assuring to see how coming from things like Lamarckism and humorism, and we have been improving the scientific method and how we approach the development of theories. It feels we've got science to a point where we're ok saying we don't know this or that, which sounds much more helpful than just taking a stab at it and going with it for a few centuries.
The anti-science folk I don't feel are the same. That feels like more outright rejecting of evidence and going on vibes rather than just treating a hypothesis as something more proven than it really is. Even with the louder voice and means of reinforcement we've given the anti-science crowd, there are still more people that are using our modern methods of communicating and sharing knowledge over distance to do good work. We're closer to another Dark Age than I'd like with the path some world leaders are tiptoeing on, but humans are still discovering and inventing and beginning to understand so much every day.