The twists and turns of the Mississippi River are helping the efforts to clean up Wednesday’s oil spill, according to a Coast Guard Captain.

Decontamination crews are slowly mopping up the oil with pitchfork and pom-poms along the banks of the Mississippi River.

"The Mississippi River is a very windy river. With the wind speed and the currents, it's actually forcing the oil to bank itself," said Coast Guard Capt. Lincoln Stroh.

That means the thick, black oil that experts say is so dangerous to wildlife collects in bends of the river, and according to Louisiana’s Oil Spill Coordinator, Roland Guidry, only a thin sheen of residue makes its way down to the delta.

"We're hopefully not going to get any black oil in the wildlife management areas. That's the good part. The bad part is that the oil is staying upriver and accumulating in the bends, so the wildlife in that area will probably get impacted. How heavy, we don't know," said Guidry.

The first step in the clean up is to trap all the free oil floating in the river, according to Coast Guard officers.

To do that, clean up crews have laid out more than 100,000 miles of containment boom trap it, then skim it off the water, trying to recover useable oil.

"Once the free oil is gone, we'll wash the oil off the shore lines, collecting that oil. Depending on the situation, we may have to clean it a little bit harder. We may have to use like steam cleaning to get it as pristine as it was," said Charlie Henry, Scientific Support Coordinator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

In some cases, crews are forcing the oil toward the shore line.

"The oil does change. We've lost some by evaporation. The oil also weathers because of this nice, hot sun it bakes it," Henry said.

So far, wildlife officials said they've found few animals coated with oil, but said that they fully expect a tough recovery effort in the coming days and weeks.

"You're seeing these kinds of onesies and twosies, but again, if you multiply that effort over a hundred (miles) times two, it's just a challenging recovery effort that we're going to be facing,” said Tom MacKenzie, of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

The US Fish & Wildlife Service is patrolling the river banks looking for animals that may be covered in oil, but they're asking for the public's help.

If you see any animals with oil on them along the Mississippi River, officials ask you to call (504) 393-0353 as soon as possible.