GARDEN NOTEBOOK;Paradise Returns (With Heliport) By ANNE RAVER

Published: March 21, 1996

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WHEN Louis Bacon bought Robins Island about two years ago, he didn't know he was protecting the endangered Eastern mud turtle. Nobody knew that a pond there, never sprayed for mosquitoes, was a safe home to the healthiest turtle population in the state.

Mr. Bacon, a Wall Street trader who controls a $2 billion fund, just wanted a family retreat and hunting preserve. It shimmered at him one day years ago when he was on a fishing boat in the middle of the Great Peconic Bay, between the north and south forks of Long Island. Its canopy of oak trees must have made it look like some lush, mysterious paradise -- a teardrop of 435 acres, formed 10,000 years ago by a melting glacier, and only 80 miles from Manhattan.

Late in 1993, Mr. Bacon bought the island out of bankruptcy for $11 million. He had secured his own little world -- but it was a very troubled one. So he set about the task of restoring a habitat that had been deteriorating for 300 years.

One of the ponds was so choked with phragmites that almost all the other plants and animals had been pushed out. There was no room for herons to fish, frogs to swim, or ducks to paddle. And deer had eaten anything in sight. The old hunting camp had been abandoned for years.

But for East Enders, the island a few miles off the town of New Suffolk is a much-beloved landmark, and they have been watching its fate apprehensively.

"I'm one of the island's oldest living trespassers," said Arthur Ross, a retired lawyer who summered in Mattituck as a boy and loved to sail over to the island and sneak about the rundown buildings.

For 20 years, the Nature Conservancy on Long Island had leaned on Suffolk County to buy Robins Island for a park, while development schemes washed over it like the brown tide. The owners before Mr. Bacon had entertained everything from a $10 million offer from the Prince of Morocco, who arrived with a $500,000 down payment in a suitcase, to a $50 million resort hotel.

But Mr. Bacon, 39, just wants one mansion, one swimming pool, a little recreation center (squash court, rifle and handgun range and so on), a farm center for his dogs, horses and game birds, and an expanded hunting camp. And O.K., a heliport.

He is as elusive as an Eastern mud turtle, and declines to be interviewed about his island or anything at all. But even a turtle would agree that when Mr. Bacon first dropped down on the island like some Teddy Roosevelt from the sky, he made a grand entrance.

"All of a sudden, this big seaplane circles the island very low and lands in the water," said Albert D'Agostino, a lawyer who worked for the previous owners. The pilot jumped out and carried Mr. Bacon to shore. "This is what it must have been like when Christopher Columbus came ashore to the island of Hispaniola."

When he bought his paradise, Mr. Bacon gave $1.1 million to the Nature Conservancy to monitor the rare and endangered species on the island. He is now working on an agreement to preserve the island forever.

A few weeks after closing the deal, he started drawing up a restoration plan with his architect, James Thompson, and about 20 consultants, including a zoologist, an entomologist, a biologist, a geologist, a hydrogeologist and a historian, who began to examine the island like a layer cake. They mapped out the wild and endangered species as well as all the native plants and animals. They took core samples of the peat buried in the ponds to study the shifting patterns of the dunes. They studied erosion patterns.

"We essentially had a 435-acre terrarium that could be quantified and understood," Mr. Thompson said.

The first close-up view the architect had was when he was deposited by helicopter on a reconnaissance mission into a wasteland of trees downed by 50 years of hurricanes and impenetrable vines that even a herd of 200 hungry deer couldn't eat. It was a freezing January day. Mr. Thompson was used to building houses in Connecticut.

In the spring, the woods looked like a big, empty room. The deer had stripped every plant on the ground and all the leaves from the trees except for a ceiling of green out of their reach.

"The rare and endangered plant species were all being wiped out," Mr. Thompson said. "It made everyone see that we had to cull the herd." In the winter of 1994, half a dozen members of Hunters Against Hunger shot 100 deer and gave the venison to soup kitchens. The next year, they shot all but about 20, a number biologists say the island can sustain.

For nearly two years, a crew of 20 men armed with clippers and chain saws hacked their way through the vines. They used no herbicides in deference to the wildlife. But it wasn't the usual landscaping job.

"It was like being in Alaska," Mr. Thompson said. "We had to haul a lot of things on our backs from an old World War II landing craft that came aground 100 feet from shore. I gained a lot of respect for the armed forces landing at sea."

The restoration team wasn't just dealing with a tangle of briers. They were trying to divine what had existed before the first settlers came. The virgin oaks had been cut long ago for lumber and firewood. The colonists plowed the land for crops and let sheep and cattle over-graze the wild meadows. They mined the prehistoric clay pits to make bricks, and clear-cut more forest to fire the kilns.

By the late 1800's, the land had passed to the Robins Island Club, a group of wealthy New Yorkers, who stocked it with thousands of partridges and pheasants and motored down from the city on the weekend to shoot hundreds in a single day. (The dead birds were ferried back to the mainland and given to the needy.) Their lodge burned down accidentally when one of the members threw his bedclothes behind the wood stove and went off to the shoot.

Now, Mr. Bacon is returning the island to that century-old tradition, but with a difference. He wants to bring back the native plants and animals that were lost over centuries.

"If we did nothing, it would all be bittersweet and phragmites and deer," said Edmund Hollander, a landscape architect who is part of the restoration team. "The real question when it comes to restoration is: 'What is nature? What are we restoring it to?' The island has been a game preserve for a hundred years. So is this an Adirondack camp? Is it Lutyens? What is it?"

Mr. Hollander's first job was to restore the reed-choked swamp called South Pond. His crew ripped out the offending phragmites -- reeds with roots that burrow four feet into the mud -- buried them in a nearby field.

"We treated it like toxic waste," Mr. Hollander said. "Buried it under four feet of soil, covered that with a thick plastic liner, and then four more feet of soil." Every day, a man in a rowboat raked every single root found floating on the surface.

Years of saltwater intrusion through eroded dunes had turned the freshwater pond brackish. So the dunes were repaired and the pond was enlarged and sculptured with little coves for ducks. The crew planted the edge with sedges, reeds and wild irises; waded into the mud and planted eupatorium, lobelias and bulrushes; put in native cedars, shadblow, clump maples, dogwoods and blueberry bushes, and put a 10-foot deer fence around the whole site.

Fields that have long grown corn and sorghum are being turned back to what biologists call old fields, scrubby fields full of native grasses and perennials, with thickets of bayberry, sumac,

blueberry, and native trees like black cherry, clump maple and cedars. "These thickets are probably the most valuable and rich layer for wildlife," Mr. Hollander said. "The upland birds love it and the little mammals like chipmunks and pheasants."

Key plants are mapped on a grid known as a geological information survey, so that their success and failure can be monitored for generations.

But it's hard to make a dent in 435 acres of over-grazed land. The word "landscape" is not allowed on this island. Nature loves a mess.

By June, the team will have planted tens of thousands of native grasses, shrubs and trees. And the more gnarled and windblown, the better.

Least terns and piping plovers, both endangered species, have begun to nest on the beaches again, now that a section has been fenced off from humans.

It was Mr. Thompson, standing in the mud of a coastal saltwater pond with biologists, who picked up a homely little turtle who was biting his boot. He held it out to the biologists and said, "Is this what you're looking for?"

Photos: The restored South Pond, above. Robins Island, amid the forksof Long Island, is returning as a natural habitat. On Robins Island, ospreys have nested in a hackberry tree. Eastern mud turtles live nearby. (Photographs by Vic DeLucia/The New York Times)(pg. C10); Robins Island, set in Great Peconic Bay, is being brought back to health. (Peter Mauss)(pg. C1) Map of Long Island showing location of Robins Island. (pg. C10)