Pen pals from the ocean

How would you like to have a whole host of pen pals coming out from the ocean?

It may not literally sound correct but for Harold Hackett it is an experience to remember and cherish.

He has a host of over 3,100 pen pals found from the Atlantic Ocean. After reading this you may become inquisitive as to know how he found these pen pals from the ocean.

Hackett going to drop bottled messages.

For the past 15 years Harold Hackett, a resident of Tignish, a fishing village on Prince Edward Island, a province of Canada, along the Atlantic coast had been tossing bottled messages in the ocean with the hope of getting responses from the bottles’ finders. Although you may find this exercise some what boring or crazy, yet for Hackett it has been a fruitful exercise. Upto now he has received 3,100 replies out of 4,800 messages he has sent out in juice containers.

The 59-year-old Hackett uses empty juice bottles with the launch date inscribed in permanent marker. He encloses photocopied messages requesting those who find the bottles to write back to him. He doesn’t include his telephone number because he wants a tangible reply.

Some of his bottles have taken more than a decade to be discovered. Some have been opened and returned to the waves, only to be found by another person elsewhere.

Citing an example he says he received one reply back with five different people finding the bottle.

“They found it and let it go. It started in Cape Breton, went to Nova Scotia. It then went to Newfoundland and then to St Pierre-Miquelon and Florida, and the last person wrote back,” Hackett said. 'There were five letters in the letters when I finally got it,’ he said. The 3,100 letters he has received up to now had come from the furthest corners of the world - including Russia, Holland, South America and Bahamas.

Hackett dubbed as “Harold the Bottleman”says “I never dreamt I’d get that many back that quick…I usually get about 150 Christmas cards, gifts and souvenirs,” adding that many responders become more than just one-time pen pals.

Hackett loves his hobby of sending out messages in bottles and making more friends. He wants to continue this pastime in the future as well.

Photo-bomber ruins it all

It was all set! Nick Landis wanted to do it in style. So he took her beloved Erika to Disney World to say “Will you marry me?” In the midst of an unknown crowd Nick went down on his knee and proposed to Erika, and the photographer too was ready to grab this historic moment. But as Nick went down on one knee and proposed, the photographer clicked, but to everyone’s amazement an unsuspecting photo bomber walked into the frame just at the wrong moment and ruined everything.

The accidental photo-bomber pulls an awkward face that seems to indicate he recognised his blunder just a moment too late. The husband-to-be captioned the hilarious photo: ‘Tried to get a photo of our proposal...nailed it!’

After the first man moves out of the way, another person stands between the couple and the camera - this time, a girl wearing a bright pink dress. The girl stands directly in front of Erika, essentially ruining the potentially heart-warming photo, taken in front of the amusement park's iconic Cinderella Castle.Luckily, though, the couple seemed to be too in love to care about a few sabotaged images.

In another shot, the future husband and wife lock lips in a passionate embrace. And the following image in the sequence shows them finally having their special one-on-one moment, as Erika smiles happily in her fiancé’s arms while a crowd claps in the background.

'Asian Unicorn' - a rare species found in Vietnam jungles

The Unicorn, a beast with a large pointed, spiralling horn projecting from its forehead is considered as a legendary animal. It has been depicted since antiquity in the seals of the Indus Valley Civilisation and in ancient Greek mythology and European folklore the Unicorn had been described as an extremely wild woodland creature.

The Unicorn can be considered more as a myth than an actual living creature.

But in the thick jungles of Laos and Vietnam, a unique species similar to the legendary Unicorn was sighted for the first time in 1992. Found near the border between Laos and Vietnam the Saola, dubbed 'Asian Unicorn' was the first large mammal new to science in more than 50 years, according to a World Wildlife Fund [WWF]statement.

Since its discovery, the elusive creature has rarely been seen in the wild, although it has earned the nickname 'Asian Unicorn' unlike the legendary specimen the Saola has two horns instead of one. The camera traps set out by the WWF and the Vietnamese government in the Annamite Mountains in Vietnam had captured the photograph of this extremely rare animal.

The last sighting of a Saola in the wild was in 1999 in Laos.

Van Ngoc Thinh, Vietnam’s country director for the WWF, in a statement said: “When our team first looked at the photos we couldn’t believe our eyes. Saola are the holy grail for South-east Asian conservationists so there was a lot of excitement.”

As seen in the photographs and details based on interviews with villagers who have seen the animal it is more closely related to wild cattle, it also resembles an antelope and the two sharp horns can reach 4 feet [1.2 metres]. An adult Saola stands at about 80-90 centimetres at the shoulder with its body length measuring approximately 150 cm.

According to a report in the Smithsonian magazine citing the accounts of villagers it has been estimated a global population of about 250 to 300 animals.

Saola stay in mountain forests during the wet seasons, when water in streams and rivers is abundant and move down to the lowlands in winter.

According to villagers they are shy and will never enter cultivated fields or come close to the villages. Two Saola were captured in central Vietnam, in 1993 but died after several months proving the fact that they cannot survive in captivity.

As Saola is listed as critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, important steps have been implemented by WWF conservationist working with Vietnamese partners to protect Saola from illegal hunting.

It has also been reported that about 30.000 snares have been removed from the Saola habitat since 2011 and over 600 illegal hunters’ camps have been destroyed.