“I was just there to play disc golf,” says Jonathan Marlowe, who last week teed off with friends at the Splinter City Disc Golf Course in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. On Hole 11, he looked up and saw an osprey carrying something in its claws—and that’s when things got weird.
“It’s not uncommon to see an osprey carrying something, but you take note because it’s still really cool to see,” says Marlowe, who lives in the area. As he watched, two crows suddenly showed up and started pursuing the osprey, and within seconds the three birds took their tussle into a nearby tree. “That’s when the osprey lost his lunch” and something crashed to the ground, Marlowe says. “I thought it would be a random fish.”
Technically he was right: The small, dead hammerhead shark that lay on the ground was a fish, and it certainly was random; it’s not common for ospreys to catch sharks. (Although this one did.) However, the water-loving raptors are expert and opportunistic anglers; they dive from as high as a hundred feet at speeds of up to fifty miles per hour, plunging feet first with their extra-curved talons to grasp and retain whatever slippery prey they’ve spotted from above.
In this case, the osprey didn’t get to eat its prize. According to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, mobbing behavior from crows isn’t unusual, especially in the springtime, when the smaller birds team up for safety to chase potential predators away from their nesting sites or food sources.
It’s also not unusual for disc golfers to encounter wildlife on their courses, which are often located in natural areas, but this sighting was one for the books. “We couldn’t believe it and kept asking ourselves, Did that really just happen?” says Marlowe, who conjectures that the osprey was doing its hunting around the nearby Springmaid Pier.
After the encounter, the friends left the fallen hammerhead under the tree in case the osprey came back. Later, when Marlowe posted photos of the incident on Facebook, another disc golfer commented that he had found the shark under the tree. “They were standing there in shock with no frame of reference for what could have possibly happened,” Marlowe says. “But then they saw the post and said, ‘Thank goodness, because how do you explain a random hammerhead in the woods?’”
