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There’s plenty of overlap between golf and disc golf (as the names would suggest), including the fact that there’s a good chance you’ll encounter some wildlife during a round. However, a man who was playing the latter in South Carolina got a pretty unexpected surprise courtesy of a shark that suddenly appeared during the outing.
I’ve played around a dozen rounds of golf at a number of different courses in New England so far this year, and the list of animals I’ve come across includes rabbits, deer, geese, turtles, and what myself and my playing partners all agreed was a bear cub roaming the green on a par 3 only to eventually discover it was actually a dog that belonged to a guy who lived next to the hole.
That’s obviously just a small sample of the wild animals you might come across on the links; people who live in Alligator Country have become very accustomed to sharing the course with those massive reptiles, more than a few Australians have had to deal with herds of kangaroos, and I’m hoping I never join the sizeable group of golfers who’ve gotten a scare from a snake lurking somehwere off of the fairway.
I have played exactly zero rounds of disc golf in my life, but as I mentioned above, I do know that animal encounters are also…par for the course (no, I will not apologize).
However, you probably won’t come across a stranger story than the one a South Carolina man named Jonathan Marlowe recently shared with Garden & Gun.
Marlow and some buddies headed to Splinter City Disc Golf Course in Myrtle Beach at the end of May and were on the 11th hole when they spotted an osprey flying through the sky with what they assumed was a fish in its claws.
The bird was subsequently accosted by a couple of crows that forced it to land in a tree before its catch dropped to the ground, and while Marlowe had correctly assumed it was some sort of fish, he was understandably surprised to see it was a small hammerhead shark (one that specifically appeared to be of the undersized bonnethead variety that are in ample supply off the coast of North Carolina during the warmer months of the year).
Marlowe says he and his friends left the shark under the tree in case the osprey wanted to retrieve it, but they were informed it was still there later that day after another disc golfer who spotted it commented on his Facebook post recapping the incident.