Life after an oil spill.

The Arthur Kill estuary runs for 15 miles between Staten Island and New Jersey, a shipping lane kept busier than the Panama Canal by garbage barges destined for the Fresh Kills landfill, tugboats pushing white mustaches of surf and oil tankers that dock at the refineries that fill the skyline with odd smokestacks. Some flare like cigarette lighters, while others have frets on their sides like flutes. "If you blindfolded me, I could still tell you where we are on the Kill by the smell," says Carl Alderson, a restoration ecologist for the New York City parks department, giving a tour in his Boston whaler.

Yet wildlife flourishes in this industrial wasteland. Wild pheasants live among the grassy oil tank farms, peregrine falcons nest under the Goethals Bridge, herons and egrets swarm onto Pralls Island in the spring to build giant nests in the trees and hatch their young. Alderson has even seen turtles surface in the dark water like visitors from another planet.

Proud of this tenacious wildlife, New Yorkers were shocked to open their papers on New Year's Day 1990 to read that Exxon had done it again. An underwater pipe had ruptured and leaked much of the night, spilling 567,000 gallons of Number 2 fuel oil into the Kill. It fouled the shoreline and killed almost 700 birds. Deeply embarrassed, Exxon quickly settled for $17 million. The City decided to spend $1.1 million to restore nine acres of marsh that had been wiped out by the black tide.

Alderson pulls ashore at the site where he, two colleagues and dozens of volunteers spent the spring and summer of 1994 planting 100,000 green horsetails of native spartina alterniflora grass. With 16-pound augers, they dug holes in the mud, often catching a strong whiff of the oil still saturating the ground, and planted the grass along with a film canister full of fertilizer. In wintertime, they put down the hardware and write scientific papers for their peers, since they're the first group to restore an oil spill site. "This is a biathalon of restoration ecology. I weighed 90 pounds more before this," Alderson jokes. Today, thin as a stork in his green rubber fishing overalls, he leads the volunteers through the mud to harvest brown seeds from the grass for next year's crop of plants.

The ecologists hope to jump start this salt marsh into growing back by itself into a full ecosystem. The grass roots host microorganisms that eat some of the oil. The team has scattered mussels and clams. Fiddler clams, which burrow in the peat banks until it becomes black swiss cheese, are returning on their own. Last fall, when a blue crab wandered into the grass, it made the front page of The New York Times.

But Alderson isn't a fool. "This could all be destroyed by another oil spill," he admits. Someone spills oil somewhere in the greater New York/New Jersey harbor almost every other day. Until then, he's going to have fun. He invites several volunteers onto the Boston whaler to ride back down to Pralls Island to look for more egrets.

CONTACT: Salt Marsh Restoration Team, New York Parks and Recreation (Green Belt), 200 Nevada Avenue, Staten Island, NY 10306/[phone].