Digital Extra

On a normal day, it is a place of utter peace, one where geese and ducks cruise above the dunes, where the blue of the pond matches that of the ocean, and where the sands of a timeless beach shift one way and another, and back again, with the wind.

Visitors to Moonstone yesterday, however, found the place altered as no season has ever done.

The change was first evident along the dirt road that leads to the beach. There, to the southwest, just above the cattails and dune grasses, an alien construction loomed, rising like the torched ruin of some terrible war.

It was the burned out superstructure of the tugboat Scandia, which caught fire in a storm Friday night and ran aground, dragging with it the oil barge North Cape and its 4 million barrel cargo of heating oil.

From the beach, the barge itself came into view -- an inelegant vessel even on its best day. On this day, it was a wounded, lethal thing, hemorrhaging from some hidden gash a steady rush of red oil. With each wave that swept past the barge's bow, the oil showed itself as translucent wall of red.

From behind the beach, the cold north wind that blew across Trustom Pond bore the pungent evidence of oil that had washed there Friday night, as the storm-driven high tide surged over the beach.

On the beach, helicopters landed every few minutes. Four-wheel-drive vehicles, bearing people in uniform, back and forth. Crews of salvage workers and oil-containment experts trooped this way and that, while television, radio and print reporters and camera operators tried to record every moment.

All the while, the red oil leaked, and although experts predicted the wind would blow it into the open ocean to the south, the slick seemed aimed to the east, streaming unabated toward the end of Moonstone that becomes Matunuck -- where the toll on wildlife began to be counted most heavily yesterday.

Among the creatures most seriously hit were lobsters. According to U.S. Fish and Wildlife biologist Tom Halavik, the violent surf that accompanied Friday night's storm took the oil from the surface and churned "into the entire water column" -- even to the bottom where lobsters live.

"It's toxic and it will kill anything it meets," said Halavik.

Walking on the rocky reef called Deep Hole, Raymond Haduk saw the evidence all too plainly: Dead and dying lobsters were everywhere. They ranged in size from restaurant-sized keepers to juveniles only inches long.

Haduk said he was helping the DEM collect lobsters that might still be alive in hope of "bringing them somewhere there's no oil." The wire basket he carried to collect the creatures filled quickly.

He was assisted by several other people, including a number of children, who hopped across the stony reef, plucking lobsters from the tide pools and bringing them excitedly to Haduk.

"Another lobster!" a child called as she ran with the dark crustacean.

"Is it alive?" Haduk asked.

"I'm not sure," she said, and dropped it in the basket.

Haduk wasn't encouraged. "There's only a few alive. Most of them are dead."

He motioned to an area a hundred yards to the east. "Go over there. There's about 2,000 of them. Looks like somebody just dumped them on the beach."

Indeed, the area of the beach was thick with lobsters and other shellfish. Department of Environmental Management biologists David Borden, Arthur Ganz and April Valliere poked through the litter, noting how the oil had not discriminated as to which size or sex it affected, but seemed to kill each lobster in its path.

They also checked off other varieties of animals they found dead: "Sea urchins. Rock crabs. Sand crabs. Jonah crabs. Blue crabs. Mussels."

Kneeling in the sand, Borden laid out a calibrated stick, one meter long, and in the sand drew the other three sides of a square meter. Then, he, Valliere, and Conservation Officer Lee Newell began grabbing lobsters from the square and tossing them out.

When the area was cleared, Borden asked, "How many, April?"

"60," she said.

"Lee?"

"55."

On a scrap of paper, Borden wrote "42" beside his name and added the column.

"157," he said. "In a square meter."

Borden rose and pointed to birds circling nearby. "Clearly, gulls have been feeding before we got here. What we're seeing is a small indication of the damage that's been done."

On another part of the Deep Hole reef, Peter Paton, a University of Rhode Island ornithologist, stumbled over the rocky ground with an awkward bundle in his arms -- a large loon, reeking of oil, unable to fly.

Through binoculars, Paton had spotted the bird trying to preen oil from its wings. Now, Paton struggled to put the bird into a box and to cover it with a blanket. "You've got to worry about hypothermia with these guys," said Paton.

With the bird secure, Paton drove briskly west, along Matunuck Beach Road and then onto Card Pond Road, and finally turned through an opening in a stone wall marked by a hand-lettered sign, "Oiled Bird Drop Off," to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife station.

Once inside, Fish and Wildlife staff members, assisted by volunteers, took the loon from the box, laid it carefully on a table, and began wrapping it in "Dri Bottoms," a brand of disposable baby diapers.

Biologist Ron Flores explained that the diaper-wrapping is crucial to keep the birds from attempting to preen the toxic oil from their feathers and ingesting the oil.

With the wrapping done, several pairs of hands lifted the bird and placed it in a large cardboard box. The flaps on the box were closed and secured with tape, and the box was stacked next to several others containing birds. All were bound for Wickford, where veterinarian Meredith Bird was busy trying to clean oil from their feathers.

Flores said the disabled birds began coming at around 9 a.m., and by early afternoon around two dozen birds had been brought in alive, and more than a dozen dead.

"Most of what we're getting are common loons, common eider and horned grebes," he said. "That makes sense because those are some of the most common birds we have."

Back at Deep Hole, things weren't getting any better.

Two Fairfield, Conn., surfers, Robert Brennan and David Guglielm, had driven two hours to their favorite surfing spot, listening to news reports along the way and hoping that any spilled oil would be well out to sea by the time they arrived.

They were wrong.

"It was disgusting," said Brennan. "In 8 inches of water, you couldn't see the bottom because of the oil. We waded out waist deep and couldn't take it. The fumes were too much."

"It was noxious," said Guglielm. "It was terrible."

Nearby, in Maroney's diner, Manley Tuttle was just as unhappy about things.

He lives on the beach because he loves it, but he had spent his morning helping a neighbor pick up oil-soaked birds, some alive, some dead, from the beach. "It's not a lot of fun carrying a blanketful of dead birds," he said.

What made it worse was that the beach was thick with dead lobsters. He said he knows these things happen, but what he couldn't fathom was why the crew of the tugboat tried to steam through such a violent storm as the one that struck Friday.

"I was in Warwick and I couldn't walk because of the wind," he said. "What were they doing out there? Why didn't they stop in Connecticut or some place?"

Behind the counter, Kathy Kenny, who runs the place with her husband, Michael, flipped hamburgers and spoke of the common worry that because the storm had breached the beach in front of Card's Pond, which joined Trustom Pond, that oil would find its way into both salt ponds.

Kenny called the grounding "a castastrophe" for the area, and said that she first realized things were bad when she tried to take her dog for a walk Friday night.

"He got to the end of the driveway and just sat down and wouldn't go any farther," she said. "It must have been the smell."