You know, there are a lot of people out there doing some really weird
 stuff.

Today, in Keyport Harbor, New Jersey, volunteers with the New York/New
 Jersey Baykeeper are going to dump 5,000 bushels of oyster shells
 (that's a lot) into Raritan Bay. Five days later, they'll deposit 10,000
 baby oysters on top of the shells.

I couldn't believe it either, so I hopped a train and headed straight for
 Keyport Harbor, a cute little oyster town across the water from Staten
 Island, where I met Mike Stringer, a 26-year-old who's as committed to
 saving oysters as I am to eating them.

Believe me, that's pretty committed.

The project is an expansion of an earlier effort in the upper part of New
 York harbor. Two years ago, 10,000 bushels of shells were dumped near
 Liberty Island. Early results were impressive enough to give it another
 go on the other side of the huge estuary we call home.

But this is the amazing part. While Stringer was setting up today's shell
 drop, about a hundred volunteers -- everyone from Girl Scouts to a guy
 who lives along the Gowanus Canal (oy!) -- have been raising baby
 oysters in specially designed traps in preparation for Saturday's
 bivalve boatlift.

Stringer showed off one of the containers, which held a few dozen babies
 (fortunately, I had eaten on the train or else this endangered species
 would have been SERIOUSLY in danger).

Without a reef, the baby oysters would get trapped under a layer of mud
 or, worse, get eaten by a crab ("worse" because those oysters are
 rightfully MINE!). Beyond protection, the best part is that the reef is
 like one big oyster singles bar.

It's not what you think. Oysters don't reproduce by finding Mr. Goodbar,
 but by spewing millions of sperm and eggs into the water and hoping for
 some good luck. The fertilized eggs float around until they attach to
 something hard -- like an old oyster shell on a newly created reef.

"So the reef is like one big oyster party," Stringer said. "By clustering
 oysters on a reef, there's a better chance of fertilization."

Who cares about some silly little oysters? Well, anyone with a sense of
 history. The project's goal is to restore the oyster bed once called
 Chinagora by the local Indians, who used to haul up oysters by the
 thousands, oysters the size of dinner plates (where's a time machine
 when you need one?).

Rich oyster beds such as Chinagora were active for thousands of years.
 For a couple of centuries after the European invasion, oysters were as
 ubiquitous in colonial New York as the dirty water dogs sold by hot dog
 vendors today. A few cents bought you a half-dozen blue points or
 cherrystones that had been plucked from very local waters earlier that
 day. What we call Liberty and Ellis islands, the Dutch called Oyster
 islands.

Of course, in addition to a hunger for oysters, the white man was famous
 for something else: a mistaken belief that the resources of the New
 World were inexhaustible. By 1900, the settlers had killed their golden
 goose -- the oyster beds that had made them rich.

But that process is going to start changing this weekend. The goal is
 more than to birth a few thousand oysters. Over the long term, Baykeeper
 hopes to create new beds all around New York City. And don't worry,
 Baykeeper is not some a crazy animal rights group hell bent on saving
 the oysters at the expense of your (or, more important, my) stomach. If
 all goes according to plan, someday you'll be able to go to The Oyster
 Bar and order up a plate of Ellis Island oysters on the half-shell.

That would be fine by Stringer (even though the oysters you'd be ordering
 would be the offspring of the babies he and his volunteers raised).

"It's a shame that there are no oysters to eat from New York harbor," he
 said. "Our water is actually the cleanest it's been in a century, yet
 there are no oysters down there. So if this works, we'll be happy that
 there'll be oysters to eat."

He's hardly the only one.

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email: gershny@yahoo.com