From CNN:

For the last few months, a large raven has been stalking Greencastle Golf Club in Donegal before swooping and flying off with people’s balls.
Several players have witnessed the burglar at work while others have struck what they thought was an accurate shot only to arrive on the green to find no sign of their ball.

Billy McCaul, the golf club’s office manager, says players are reporting stolen balls on a weekly basis.

“It started to happen about four months ago, when you had the odd comment about a ball being taken by a bird,” McCaul told CNN.

“Because we are a seaside course, birds have picked balls up in the air so we took it to be something like that, but then it became consistent and persistent.
“At first I took it as a bit of fun, as did most members, but it has got to the extent where it is having an effect on prizes and competitions and various other things.”

I’m going to start using Ravens as an excuse for any lost balls.

South Carolina legislators apparently are considering whether to allow golf carts on highways.

Dumb. People will get killed unnecessarily.

In one of the strangest golf stories I’ve seen yet, Dublin morticians preparing a body found a golf ball lodged in the deceased man’s throat—after a post-mortem ruled out foul play. Police apparently are looking into the incident.

I’m absolutely certain that having a golf ball lodged in your throat would induce death. The only question is whether the ball was shoved in before, or after the man died. And if it was after, that begs the question of why.

There’s a golf mystery novel in this one.

Don’t look now, but the environmentalists are going after our beloved sport:

Research teams at the Danish Golf Union have discovered it takes between 100 to 1,000 years for a golf ball to decompose naturally. A startling fact when it is also estimated 300 million balls are lost or discarded in the United States alone, every year. It seems the simple plastic golf ball is increasingly becoming a major litter problem.

The scale of the dilemma was underlined recently in Scotland, where scientists—who scoured the watery depths in a submarine hoping to discover evidence of the prehistoric Loch Ness monster—were surprised to find hundreds of thousands of golf balls lining the bed of the loch.

In addition to worrying about the millennium-long decomposition, there apparently is concern about levels of zinc in the cores.

A UK lawmaker said “From the moon to the bottom of Loch Ness, golf balls are humanity’s signature litter in the most inaccessible locations.”

You can see the Loch Ness golf balls in the video below.

Given all this, I can see a real future in biodegradable golf balls. Once the Congress gets ahold of this one ....

In what surely is a case of overkill, the Gourock Golf Club, Renfrewshire, Scotland has hired snipers to take out foxes who were digging up the course.

Naturally, the animal cruelty people are complaining, and for once I have to agree. Seems to me that live trapping the critters would have been sufficient.

But then maybe Scottish foxes are particularly aggressive and vicious. Like tigers.

A colleague heard this story in on the radio news, so naturally I went searching:

Authorities in South Carolina say James Wiencek, 77, of Chagrin Falls, is recovering after he lost his arm below the elbow on Thursday. Wiencek was attacked by an alligator while playing golf on Fripp Island.

Investigators say Wiencek was playing the 11th hole of the island’s Ocean Creek Golf Course and leaned down to pick up his ball when a 10-foot long alligator grabbed his arm. A spokesperson for the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources says Wiencek was golfing with his son James, Jr., who lives in Chagrin Falls and owns a vacation home in South Carolina.

Dave Corneliussen, an animal trapper told FOX 8, “Alligators don’t have any molars, like we do - is what we like to say - and they tear things off, part of their death roll is to rip things off and they swallow them whole or they tuck it away and let them decompose.”

The man’s son and fellow golfers were able to free him from the alligator’s grasp and called 911. Corneliussen was able to get the arm back and keep it on ice after the victim was rushed to the hospital.

And there’s video:

I actually didn’t see any alligators on my Florida golfing trip—much to my chagrin. But I did see this big cat:

From the Bostonist:

Finding the right putter is crucial to your short game, but having about 47 of them to choose from is excessive. A Charlestown couple were arrested in connection with 13 alleged golf course break-ins in the past six months and were suspected by police in Arlington, Cambridge, Belmont, and Lexington for robberies at pro shops in their towns.

Since when is having 47 putters excessive? If that’s evidence of thievery, I know several people whom police ought to investigate.