Digital Extra

A police officer racing for a fishing rod to help keep the advancing spill out of Charlestown Pond.

While salvagers continued pumping oil from the crippled North Cape yesterday, out on the edges of the noxious slick emerged tableaus of absurd improvisation and desperate heroics.

In Narragansett, bird rescuers transformed a public works garage into what resembled a hospital nursery where 90 oil-soaked loons and sea ducks sat in covered playpens and plywood cribs.

Occasionally a loon's mournful cry filled the otherwise quiet cavern, a quiet enforced by volunteers in white uniforms who stressed the importance of keeping the patients calm.

Meanwhile other bird rehabilitators force-fed the birds medicine or made "loon pillows" -- plastic trash bags stuffed with newspaper so the water birds, unaccustomed to solid ground, suffered no bed sores.

At the Charlestown Breachway, police Lt. Raoul Lefebvre returned to where on Saturday afternoon he single-handedly solved a problem that had vexed professional cleanup crews: how to stretch the first of now several booms over the turbulent green waters of the breachway.

"They needed to put a line across but they didn't want to put a boat in the water," Lefebvre explained. "The current was so strong." Showing some ingenuity, Lefebvre raced down Charlestown Beach Road to Breachway Bait and Tackle and asked to borrow a surf-casting rod.

The proprietor offered a 9 1/2-foot rod with 25-pound test line and several 4-ounce sinkers. Lefebvre's sinker reached the breachway's opposite bank on the second try. There a cleanup crew -- having driven around from East Beach -- grabbed it. The boom's line was then tied on to the fishing line and dragged across.

"We love this pond down here and we'll do anything we can to help save it," Lefebvre said.

How successful officials would be in keeping oil out the pond was a major concern yesterday afternoon.

Cleanup operators told Charlestown Police Chief Michael T. Brady that some oil had already entered the pond, coming in with the tide and under the booms, the chief said.

How much oil was unclear because it remained suspended in the water, Brady said. "Right now we don't know how much got in."

Jeff Clark, an equipment operator for Clean Venture, at the breachway to help skim up the sheen, said, "There's a decent amount of oil" toward the northern shore of Charlestown Pond.

Out on the beach, Marcelle Frechette of Richmond, who walks Charlestown Beach year-round, crouched over a grim, manmade pile of dying lobsters, clams and a bone-white skate.

She picked up a small lobster whose legs still twitched and threw it back in the water.

"I guess it's a gesture of hope," she said. "Maybe it will have a chance."

But as she watched a flock of frenzied seagulls bingeing on the toxic buffet the sea had served up, she couldn't help but feel more pesimistic than hopeful.

"It is just so distressing seeing all this beautiful habitat impacted like this."

How damaging the spill will ultimately be to wildlife remained an uncomfortable unknown at the maintenance shed at Trustom Pond, where a triage center had been set up for injured wildlife.

"That is the question and I don't have an answer," said Ronald Flores, a biologist with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.

Over the weekend dozens of loons and such sea ducks as buffleheads, goldeneye and scaup were brought to the shed. Volunteers covered the live birds with diapers, taped them with oil-absorbent pads and then transported them in boxes to the rehabilitation center in Narragansett.

But yesterday only 12 birds were brought in: 9 dead and 3 alive. Flores said he wasn't sure if that was because most of the dead or injured birds have been found or that there simply wasn't the crowd of volunteers as over the weekend out looking for them.

(The dead birds were being sent to the Fish & Wildlife Service's forensic lab in Oregon, where the exact cause of death will be determined and used as future court evidence.)

Yet Flores stressed that only volunteers trained in handling the oil-soaked birds, or federal wildlife officials should be touching the birds.

"We want to make sure people are helping the right way," he said. "The reality is you are handling hazardous waste and birds that can poke your eye out."

And by chasing after the birds, particularly the loons, which spend only nesting periods on dry land, people with good intentions can cause the birds further injury.

Conservation officers with the state Department of Environmental Management have been assigned to South County beaches, Flores said, to recover birds.

At the rehabilitation center in Narragansett, the phones did not ring off the hook with people wanting to help -- they flashed. The clear plastic phones were brought specifically so as not to disturb the birds.

Standing beside a suspended blue partition separating the bird resting area from where the birds were being cleaned, biologist Jim Myers explained a technique biologists had learned over the last few days for catching loons along the beach.

"At first, as soon as we jumped out of the truck they would run back toward the water," potentially injuring their wings. "So we put a guy in the bed of the truck"

The loons wouldn't run off if they saw just the truck approach, so the biologists would drive up close and let the bird catcher jump out of the back.

Of the 90 birds brought to the rehabilitation center -- 60 of them loons -- 4 had to be euthanized because their injuries were so severe, said state biologist Lori Suprock.

The others were in various stages of being cleaned and treated.

Suprock said the birds may end up spending weeks at the rehabilitation center until they can be safely released into clean surroundings.

In the meantime, frozen fish from Canada has been brought in to be force-fed to the birds.

Super Stop & Shop had donated a supply of Dawn liquid detergent -- the perfect soap for lifting the oil from the birds' feathers -- and three pallets of paper towels for the cleaning job.

Kim Suminski of Westerly drove an elderly friend to the center so she could donate a much-needed playpen and some towels.

"I wanted to do it in the name of my sister, Anya McCarthy," said the elderly woman, who did not want to give her name. "She was a birder. We all are."

She stuck her head in the door of the garage and took in the scene.

"Oh my God, what dedication, honestly," she said. "Doesn't that give you goose bumps?"