A few weeks ago, I was on a boat in Barataria Bay off Louisiana's Grand Isle, touring mangrove islands encircled by orange and white booms. The mangroves brimmed with roosting pelicans with their cottonball chicks and roseate spoonbills turned from pink to beige by a thin film of oil. A local Fox field reporter asked if she could see an oiled bird rescue-the avatars of the crisis. But the breeding colony didn't have birds that were oily enough for removal, so the Fish and Wildlife Service was just taking media out on motorboats for an educational tour.

Dan Horton, a friend and former colleague of mine, works on tugboats out of the New York Harbor for a living. Two weeks ago, he flew down to Louisiana to take a job on a barge unloading crude oil from the skimmer boats that clean the surface of the Gulf of Mexico. There's limited computer access on board; crew are only allowed to send and receive one email a day. Dan has been sending letters home to his girlfriend, Lori, who has been passing them along to friends and family, and now, with their permission, I'll pass them along to you. -Dave Bry

Gail Collins is my favorite op-ed columnist at the New York Times. As much as I admire her, I'll never forgive her for describing House Republicans as a "herd of rabid otters" in a column earlier this year. (Only because there's no such thing as a "herd" of otters. The analogical image itself is impressively accurate.) So I was very happy today when she again went zoological in her writing, but this time got her terms straight.

Remember back when the financial crisis hit and John McCain was all, "We should suspend our presidential campaigns" and Barack Obama was like, "Look, presidents are going to have to deal with more than one thing at a time… Let's not be jackasses about this," and even some of the people who were McCain supporters were thinking, "You know what, dude totally has a point, especially with all the messes whoever wins is going to have to face." Do you? I'm pretty sure I remember that. But it seems more and more like a dream.

Somehow I thought Elisabeth Rosenthal's perspective on the oil spill in today's Times Green blog might make me feel better. "It is important to remember that this mammoth polluting event, so extraordinary here, is not so unusual in some parts of the world," she writes, pointing to the reporting of John Vidal from the oil fields in the Niger Delta in Africa.

Dan Horton, a friend and former colleague, works on tugboats out of the New York Harbor for a living. Two weeks ago, he flew down to Louisiana to take a job on a barge unloading crude oil from the skimmer boats that clean the surface of the Gulf of Mexico. Crew are only allowed to send and receive one email a day; his girlfriend, Lori, passes along his daily email to friends and family. With their permission, we're passing them along to you. -Dave Bry

"The gulf coastal ecosystem is still under threat from the hundreds of thousands of gallons of crude gushing daily from the hole in the ocean floor. But at least Louisiana's YouTube fans can relax with the knowledge that they probably won't be caught in an oil storm. That is, unless there's a massive hurricane."

Leave it to Swiss engineering to save the day. Now that we're killing all the birds and making our oceans too oily for fish, the folks at Switzerland's federal design lab EMPA have developed a cool new machine to replace both things at once. The Airfish is a flying contraption that will remind us of a time when actual carbon-based living creatures soared through the sky and swam in the seas. It's cool to watch. And it seems to be quiet enough for governments to use it to surreptitiously monitor their citizens from above. But most importantly, maybe the guys who built it can make a really, really [...]

The latest attempt to at least minimize the amount of oil flooding into the Gulf of Mexico has been halted because a saw got stuck in a pipe on a well. The mission now is to retrieve the saw. Plan B? Get another saw. And that's what we know right now.

A massive stygiomedusa gigantea jellyfish was recently videotaped for the first time swimming around the base of an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. These three-feet-by-twenty-feet creatures are amazing to look at, but if they don't eat one hundred thousand barrels of oil a day, none of this is very important, is it?

Dan Horton, a friend and former colleague of mine, works on tugboats out of the New York Harbor for a living. Two weeks ago, he flew down to Louisiana to take a job on a barge unloading crude oil from the skimmer boats that clean the surface of the Gulf of Mexico. There's limited computer access on board; crew are only allowed to send and receive one email a day. Dan has been sending letters home to his girlfriend, Lori, who has been passing them along to friends and family, and now, with their permission, I'll pass them along to you. -Dave Bry

We may not be stupid enough to have wiped ourselves out as a species (yet), but we're certainly capable of doing it to others. Take the Louisiana pancake batfish, a species so "new" that it was only recently discovered by Louisiana State University ichthyologist Prosanta Chakrabarty, who noted the fish's freakish behavior and appearance.

From the New York Post:

A young Long Island genius took her oil-spill fix down to the Gulf yesterday, cornering a BP executive at a cleanup staging area and knocking his socks off during a half-hour powwow.

"Wow, that's very impressive," Dave Golson, BP's operations director for eastern Louisiana, said after hearing Alia Sabur's pitch. "It's something we should give serious consideration."

The paper also notes that the BP exec was prepared to dismiss the young genius, but "after she showed him a Wednesday edition of The Post, which contained a schematic of her proposal, he reconsidered."

If director James Cameron, who "was among a group of experts called in to meet with officials at the Environmental Protection Agency to help come up with ideas to deal with the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico," actually does provide a solution to the problem, well, good lord, can you imagine the swelling of his already massive ego? I don't know if the world is ready to confront something that gigantic. I mean, the thing is going to be so big that we're gonna need to call in Jerry Bruckheimer to consult on how to blow it up.