Columbia Valley Pioneer staff
Don’t ever ask this squirrel to be your caddy.
The wily rodent at Windermere Valley Golf Course was foraging last week when he saw the tail end of Jim Jenkinson’s tee shot on the 15th hole. The ball landed just off the green in deeper grass.
“While we were walking down to the green, I noticed that my ball was moving erratically [he didn’t hit it that badly] until it finally disappeared into the shadows of the nearby trees,” Jenkinson recalled.
To his surprise, he found a tiny squirrel at the base of one tree wrestling with his ball.
“It was trying to drag it up the tree. I shooed it away and moved the ball back to the original location so that I could finish playing the hole . . . with no penalty, thank goodness.”
The squirrel stayed close by while Jenkinson finished up; it barked until he finally threw the damaged ball back towards it. This time the bandit grabbed the ball in its teeth and scurried up the same tree before stopping at eye level where it began gnawing on the hard sphere.
Jenkinson and his golfing buddies couldn’t help but laugh because the squirrel wasn’t much bigger than the ball. “None of us had ever experienced such a hilarious theft of a golf ball.”
But wait . . . there’s more!
A few days later the group played another round at the course, and by this time most of the guys had heard about the golf ball bandit.
“When we teed off on the #15 hole, I warned the other players about the squirrel lurking in the trees. Sure enough, when we walked by his hangout he was there,” Jenkinson said.
One of the guys rolled a random golf ball in the bandit’s direction and it proceeded to chase after it while the player ran to recover his official ball before it was stolen too. Meanwhile, Chuck Newhouse found Jenkinson’s previously pilfered ball at the base of the rodent’s hideout.
“What are the odds that my missing ball was recovered (or perhaps it was returned to me by the same squirrel a week later)?”
