FOR MANY, A trip into nature is a chance to purify and to return. We escape the vibrations of modern life and try to attune our bodies and minds to a deeper and more consistent rhythm. The practice of using nature to help one live deliberately, as Thoreau set out to do, does not always require a sustained separation from our daily routine. One can simply take a dip in the natural world. After we hike a windy trail, or walk through a field and into the waiting shade of a forest, we come back just a little different. We take a wander along a chilly beach and return to civilization a little more wild-eyed and bedraggled, hands numb, hair wayward, skin sticky with salt. It is good to be thus disheveled, to feel the blood pound through limbs made tame by commutes and television; to let the elements lean on us a little.
When I was a teenager growing up near Point Reyes in the 1990s, the practice of slipping out of the world of expectation and into one of wilderness and tides, redwood groves and open hills under moonlight, was an important one. It usually felt as if that land had given you something, like a visitation. It was the same landscape always, but of course it was never really the same. The pageant of seasons and weather and animal life provided constant fodder for reflection. On a lonely beach walk, perhaps a single harbor seal will swim up the shore, following you. This used to happen to me all the time. Maybe you will see an owl in the middle of the day while deep in the woods, or come across a magnificent gleaming snake. Or else an early spring sunset will spread a blush over the land so otherworldly that you’ll be giddy with it. Once, while walking near the mouth of Drakes Estero I saw a gray whale breach and let out a plume of spray, impossibly close to land, or so it seemed. The few of us there on the beach whooped and pointed and laughed, with a delight so open it was almost like relief.
I need to be frank about something, and I think anyone who has spent much time out at Point Reyes will have a hard time disagreeing with it. Point Reyes is a little bit magic. I don’t just mean that it’s lovely, although it is, but that there is some strange power to be felt, which I am not alone in noticing. Spend enough time out there and you will very likely begin to feel as if the trees are talking to you, saying something old and only half-intelligible about water, soil and time. The landscape itself feels sentient. When I was young at least, there was one sight in particular that was considered the pinnacle of magical encounter, for anyone with an even remotely romantic disposition, and that was to have a run-in with the white deer. To encounter them in a meadow blurred with fog felt a little like wandering into a unicorn tapestry.
Once at the age of thirteen I was driving out to the beach with my father on a gray day. We crested a hill and there, standing a hundred feet from the road, was a white stag. We stopped the car, got out, and stayed for a moment in his presence, while he stood there, looking for all the world like a medieval illustration come to life. I’d heard that there were white deer living in the deep forests of Point Reyes, and that they would sometimes come down from the wooded hills and into the open, or even wander onto the beach, but I had never seen one before. It wasn’t exactly a unicorn, but for a thirteen-year-old girl well versed in fantasy literature, it was certainly the next best thing. Some locals called them “the ghost deer.”
A real animal in its own right, a white deer—and the white stag in particular—nevertheless has mythical abilities attached to it. In legends from the British Isles to the Middle East, a white deer is usually a kind of supernatural being. For the Celts, a white stag meant that the Otherworld was close at hand, and in Arthurian legend, it is the creature that can never be caught, but that draws you ever onward towards transformation. It is what leads queens Susan and Lucy and kings Peter and Edmund out of Narnia and back into their postwar childhoods, as the boughs of the trees that brushed against their arms gradually turned back into the bristled fur of coats in the wardrobe. The white stag is a catalyst, although whether he serves to enchant you or awaken you is unclear.
Fred Smith had only been working as executive director of the Environmental Action Committee of West Marin for a few months when, one calm morning, a distraught older man came barging into the little office. Fred recognized him as one of the organization’s members.
“Please, Fred,” the man said, with tears in his eyes. “You’ve got to stop this. They’re going to kill the white deer. The park is going to kill all of them. Please, you’ve got to do something.”
This was true, but there wasn’t much that Fred could do to change things. He’d arrived in West Marin in December 2006, one month before he was set to start work. Already in love with the area, he felt an extra sense of intimate connection to the place knowing that he had been tasked to protect it.
“I felt like an eco-warrior for this local environment,” he would later tell me.
On one of those early nights, he was having a beer at Vlad’s in Inverness. This was in the days when Vlad himself was still alive, before he passed the establishment on to his daughter Vladya, and the walls were decorated with pictures of Vlad’s true passion: former president Ronald Reagan. (Vlad died in September 2008, and the photos of Reagan are now gone.)
A man and a woman came into the bar, more dressed up than anyone Fred had seen so far in town. Apparently there was a party of some kind at the nearby Inverness Yacht Club. The couple was boisterous and happy, and Vlad introduced them.
“This is Fred Smith,” Vlad offered to the couple. “He’s taking over the EAC.”
The man was warm and jovial.
I’m Kevin Lunny, the owner of the oyster farm, Fred remembers him saying, I don’t normally dress like this.
According to Fred, they talked pleasantly for a few minutes before going about their own business of the evening. He knew there were starting to be some problems between this oyster farm and the park, but it was not yet a prominent issue in the community.
As soon as Kevin and his family bought Johnson Oyster they changed the name to Drakes Bay Oyster Company, as a nod to Larry Jensen’s original mariculture effort. In an article in the Point Reyes Light, Kevin said he didn’t plan to change the name, but apparently thought better of it after the article was published. The problems with the park started right away. As he would later express to Marin magazine reporter P.J. Bremier, Kevin had been optimistic that although the park had clearly stipulated that there would be no lease renewal past 2012, he might be able to get an extension if he instituted sufficient improvements and made the farm seem like enough of an asset to the park that the government would decide to keep it around. However at the beginning of 2005 after the sale was final, the park presented him with an agreement to sign. It explicitly stated that there would be no renewal, and that Kevin knew that. He refused to sign it, and the battle for the oyster farm began.
Fred could not have known when he met Kevin that he would soon be spending nearly all of his time trying to put him out of business. During that first year of his tenure as West Marin Eco-Warrior, the biggest and most contentious issue was the proposed slaughter of the white deer.
The “white” deer were not, in fact, all white. There were two species of exotic or “non-native” deer living in Point Reyes National Seashore at the time; the fallow deer (dama dama), about 20–40 percent of which were white (they also appeared in brown, red and even black color morphs), and the axis deer (axis axis), which were brown. The exact origin of fallow deer in general is unclear. They are usually said to come originally from “the Mediterranean,” although whether this means Spain, France, Greece, Lebanon, Algeria, etc. isn’t specified. They are now found on every continent except Antarctica, having been brought there by humans. The Romans brought them to the British Isles, and in ensuing centuries, the landed gentry of different eras would often release them onto their private estates. Yet despite their apparent ubiquity, they are still rare, or at the very least shy enough to stay out of the public eye most of the time. To see one still felt like something of a gift. They are sweet-faced, the way a Jersey cow is sweet-faced, with softer features that make their countenance look more like lambs than deer. The axis deer, also called chital, which were less showy though no less foreign, hailed from South Asia. When in the Indian epic The Ramayana, Sita begs Ram to catch a beautiful deer for her, this is the kind of deer she is likely talking about. Being brown and spotted, at least from a distance it was easy enough to confuse them with the locals. But since even the adult axis deer are speckled with white, as fawns are, they seem to live in a perpetual state of innocence.
The fallow and axis deer were brought to Point Reyes nearly seventy years ago by a San Francisco surgeon named Millard Ottinger. He had a gentleman’s ranch on Point Reyes’s Mount Vision. The locals all called him “Doc.” It was Doc who decided that he wanted the deer, but it was his twenty-six-year-old ranch hand Ambrose Gondola, a small but strong man, with arms like Popeye, who actually drove into the city in a big truck to get them one day in 1949.
The deer came from the San Francisco Zoo, and the zoo had too many of them. Doc was good friends with the zoo’s director, Carey Baldwin, who had also curated the animal collection at Hearst Castle. Normally they just fed any excess zoo deer to the lions. This time, however, they permitted Doc to buy between twenty and thirty of them to bring out to his ranch. Of the fallow deer, he wanted only the white variety, though the other colors would spring up over the years due to genetic drift. On Ambrose’s way back to the country from the city he was stopped twice by highway patrol.
“What have you got in the truck?” the officer asked him.
“I’ve got deer!” Ambrose replied.
“You’re full of so-and-so,” the officer said. But when he looked, sure enough, it was a cartload full of fairytale megafauna.
Ambrose released the deer onto Doc’s property, but only a few days later the largest white stag was shot and killed by a poacher. Defiant, the gunman had even strung the animal up outside the Inverness store in the nearby village for all to see. Doc was livid. He cut the carcass down and put it in the back of his Cadillac convertible.
“My property, my deer,” Ambrose remembered Doc saying. As far as he was concerned, it was as if someone had shot one of his cows. He had the hide tanned and the magnificent antlered head mounted. If this was a fairytale animal, it was now a grim one, the uncatchable beast having been caught. However, the sheriff at the time retroactively validated a hunting tag for the stag slayer, meaning the trophies legally belonged to him. Doc was then forced to give both hide and head to the poacher.
“That tore him apart,” Ambrose later said.
Doc sent out to the San Francisco Zoo again for more white deer.
Ottinger’s exotic deer roamed through Point Reyes as quarry for him and his hunting buddies, like fish in a stocked pond, for the next thirteen years or so. Their numbers remained small. But when the park bought the land in 1962 and public hunting stopped, their numbers began to climb.
There aren’t many predators in Point Reyes National Seashore anymore that can take down a deer. The bears for whom Bear Valley was named are long gone. There are mountain lions and coyotes, but not many. For the native black-tailed deer, by far the most effective predator is the currus terribilis, or car. In the springtime in particular, there is a disturbingly high incidence of roadkill, especially of fawns. But the fallow and axis deer were more skittish. They were almost never seen on the roadsides, and never as roadkill. Cindy Dicke, who in the early 2000s worked at the wildlife rehabilitation center now called WildCare, said the white deer largely managed to stay out of sight and trouble.
“It’s strange,” she told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2006, “but in five years working at the Wildlife Center I don’t recall a single incident of a white deer being hit or injured by a car. It just hasn’t happened.”
In the 1960s, with the park officially created but not yet completed, the herds of fallow and axis deer grew. In the early 1970s when the park began to more actively edit the landscape, it commissioned a study of the exotics by two graduate students. The conclusion of the young biologists was ambivalent. They wrote that “limited degrees of competition may exist” between the native and non-native deer, but that viewing the fallow and axis deer “adds much to the recreational enjoyment” of park visitors. Yet there was talk even then of eliminating the interlopers. The grad students did not see such a plan as necessary or even feasible.
“To attempt to restore a pristine environment will not be possible until the long-term leases of the dairy ranchers expire and the maintenance of the exotic deer population at a prescribed level could satisfy both recreational and local economic interests,” they wrote.
The park began an ad hoc culling program, intending to keep each herd of exotic deer under about 350 individuals. Rangers themselves did the culling, setting out with rifles in the early hours of the morning. If the dead deer was easy to collect, then the park donated the meat to one of several local charities. If the animal fell somewhere more rugged, where it would be hard for a vehicle to reach to transport the carcass, then the deer was left to decompose naturally back into the landscape. This was often the case. This program continued from 1976 until 1994, during which time rangers shot around three thousand individuals.
In 1984, the park considered instituting a massive public hunt to eliminate all of the exotics for good. That plan would have entailed closing the park for about six weeks, most likely in the autumn. Burr Heneman, Sarah Allen’s colleague at the Point Reyes Bird Observatory, was also a member of a subcommittee of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, which strongly rejected the proposal.
“Contrary to the impression projected in some newspaper articles, the committee is a long way from making decisions,” Burr told the Coastal Post in February 1984. “We all agreed an annual supervised deer hunt would not kill enough deer to control the population and would open the door to quail and duck hunting in the park. However, we have a responsibility not to let deer spread all over West Marin. It is a research problem that must be dealt with. We have even discussed the possibility of birth control.”
Indeed, they were looking into non-lethal ways to manage the deer population, either through sterilization or experimental wildlife contraceptives that could be administered by dart gun. Barring that, the committee said they preferred a systematic slaughter to an open season, as conservationists were concerned about making the hunt a public affair. According to Fred’s predecessor at the EAC, Susanna Jacob, a public hunt would open the park up for “multiple use,” which meant deer, quail and duck hunting as Burr mentioned, but also exploration for minerals and logging for timber, she said.
In 1992, an article appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle detailing the already existing culling program, and there was a public outcry: people did not want the park to kill the deer, not by any means. Protest continued, and in 1994 when Don Neubacher took over as superintendent, he stopped the culling and announced that the park would do an official Environmental Impact Study in order to see what should be done. Meanwhile, another group of charismatic megafauna in the park was about to take center stage with a controversy of its own.
Tule elk, or valley elk as they are also called, have occupied a 2,600-acre fenced enclosure on Tomales Point since their reintroduction in 1978. In 1998, forty-five elk were individually airlifted by helicopter to a new habitat in the wilderness on the other side of the park where they are allowed to roam free from the Estero de Limantour to Bolinas. But in 2004, elk started turning up in the pastoral zone and mixing with cows on the historic ranches. After a few years, there was an established ranchland herd.
Left to roam freely over the pastures, elk competed with cows for water and forage, and damaged fences and equipment. Antlered males were said to have injured farm animals, and calmer elk were even observed standing in line with cows at cattle feeds. In a 1998 environmental assessment for the elk’s management, the seashore posed the elimination of the ranches on the peninsula as one way to handle the burgeoning ungulate population. This option was just one of many, but still that report also mentioned a 1980 public law giving the Secretary of the Interior the right to terminate ranch leases for the sake of preserving “park resources,” which would certainly include elk.
In Point Reyes National Seashore, only one of the tule elk’s two major natural predators remain: man. For about ten thousand years, it is believed that the native Miwok peoples hunted the elk for meat, tallow, antlers and hide. Living in more than one hundred coastal villages along Point Reyes, they encouraged elk onto the open plains by burning back the grasslands to increase seed production and eliminate shrubs for better grazing. Along with the elk’s other major predator, the grizzly bear, the Miwok kept the population in balance. The open expanses of pre-European California provided a wide range for the animals, which swam across bays and rivers to reach better forage. Before the arrival of missionaries and settlers, the elk numbered about five hundred thousand statewide.
But the Spanish, and later other Europeans, nearly wiped them out, shooting the animals in droves for their meat and hides. Market hunters, operating without rules or regulations, and ranchers who were suffering damage to their grains, orchards and fences, winnowed down the population even further. According to historic records, the last tule elk was seen on Point Reyes in the 1860s, swimming across Tomales Bay before “disappearing into the Sonoma wilds.” The book Wild Peninsula by Laura Nelson Baker tells of a mass elk exodus, when ranchers observed the herds streaming down from the Inverness Ridge towards the bay, the antlers of the males thrust above the gray water as they swam, their harems of females swimming beside them.
By 1870, tule elk teetered dangerously close to extinction, and many thought they were already gone. Then a few were discovered in the San Joaquin Valley, on the land of a wealthy rancher, who took an interest in the animals. The rancher, Henry Miller, was the largest cattle producer in California and among the richest landowners in the country. In 1873 he helped push through legislation to make killing tule elk a felony, punishable by up to two years in prison. Under the protection of Miller’s sheltered acres, the elk increased rapidly. But as early as 1904, they were starting to outgrow their home, and Miller soon shipped twenty-one animals to Sequoia National Park. Other small elk groups were foisted on any land that would take them, but in every instance the elk roamed, preferring to find their own ideal pasture. By 1914, there were over four hundred tule elk living in the wild in Kern County, to the south of Sequoia.
“The tule elk are not a containable animal,” Wally Macgregor of the Department of Fish and Game wrote in 1973. “Elk in general do not get along well with man.”
The problem was that by the turn of the last century, most of the elk’s native habitat had already been turned into farm- and ranchland. Tule elk have a taste for green grass and tender vegetation; since they could easily leap over or trample fences, the wild herds began to wreak havoc in the gardens, farms and pastures of newly settled areas. Crop damage became so severe in Kern County that the California Academy of Sciences was asked to supervise a plan to reduce the herd. In 1920, 146 elk were captured and shipped to nineteen different counties. The herds, wherever they were placed, kept growing.
Tule elk advocates were desperate to find them new homes. In 1921, thirteen animals were released in a twenty-eight-acre fenced paddock in Yosemite—well outside their natural range. Advocate M. Hall McAllister had spent years writing to park officials, imploring them to allow “these beautiful animals” to grace the park’s meadows. Yosemite superintendent W.B. Lewis said he was in favor of anything that would “increase the variety of attractions to the visitor to the park,” but scientists were concerned over the elk’s non-native status. Mr. Lewis agreed to keep the elk fenced, as “a small exhibit herd.”
The elk quickly destroyed the vegetation in their pasture, and again their numbers ballooned. A female tule elk begins calving at age two, and usually produces one offspring a year for each year of her adult life—which, in cushy environs, can be up to twenty-five years. The herd was increasing by 25 to 50 percent a year.
“A difficult administrative situation is developing in Yosemite,” park naturalist Ansel F. Hall wrote in 1928. Prolific and ravenous, the population quickly filled every area it was moved into, decimating the local flora. In 1933, the park gave up trying to manage an animal they could neither control nor legally cull, and moved the entire herd to the Owens Valley.
There was trouble with other transplanted herds, too. In Monterey County in 1922, the entire elk herd from Del Monte Park was captured and moved to a more remote area. But the elk kept coming back. Meanwhile, back in Kern County, the herd of about 140 animals was doing so much damage that in 1934 a large tract of land was purchased by the state, fenced, and named the Kern County Tule Elk Refuge. However the herd soon overgrazed the area and eliminated most of the native vegetation. Malnutrition and disease became rampant, and the sick animals that had not already perished were destroyed to prevent the further spread of illness. The few remaining elk were fed alfalfa pellets. With the native plants eaten, and the original mesquite and willow eliminated by the damming of the Kern River, the area could only support thirty or forty animals. These were maintained primarily as a park attraction, with excess animals regularly sent to the Owens Valley. Today, the Kern County reserve has only around eighteen individuals.
Meanwhile the Owens Valley was rapidly becoming a depository for elk that had outgrown their ranges across the state. Purchased by the City of Los Angeles as a water source, the valley was also home to ranchers and farmers. (In the 1940s it was also the setting of a Japanese internment camp, and it’s possible that some of Point Reyes’s tenant pea farmers ended up there.) When first transplanted, the elk were content to roam over some three thousand acres. But as their numbers increased in the late 1930s and early 1940s, they spread out. Preferring green forage, they ate local farmers’ hay and vegetable crops. They broke through fences to feed on cultivated fields, and competed with livestock for winter browse.
As their numbers grew, a bitter conflict developed between agriculture and wildlife, and some ranchers demanded that the elk be removed from the valley. A compromise was reached when Fish and Game agreed to control the elks’ numbers. In 1943, after taking a herd census, the department allowed licensed hunters to cull forty-three bulls, but again the herd increased rapidly. Substantial culls were needed every three to four years.
In 1961, Fish and Game was forced to adopt a formal management plan for the Owens Valley. The elk herds would be maintained “primarily for aesthetic enjoyment,” and kept at about one hundred animals per herd. They would not be allowed supplemental feed, and in place of their natural predators, modern hunters would keep the elk in line with the land’s natural carrying capacity.
Despite the success elk had in populating new areas, environmental activists were concerned that the animals overall numbers remained low. A concerned Los Angeles resident named Beula Edmiston made the preservation of tule elk her personal crusade. She created an anti-hunting group, and lobbied hard for the elk’s protection. Calling them “the monarch of the wild,” she believed the elk needed not only to multiply, but to be given unrestricted range. But either unconcerned or unaware of the decades of bitter controversy in the Owens Valley, Edmiston called the refuge “the only successful transfer of the Tule Elk ever accomplished.”
“It is a sobering thought that at least four species of American elk are now extinct,” she wrote in 1966. “It should silence those who would ‘save the Tule Elk’ in a fenced enclosure like feedlot cattle.”
(It should be noted however that the tule elk are not a species, but a breed. Scientific tests have shown that they are not even a subspecies, but have simply developed different characteristics due to environmental factors. While definitely distinct—they are the smallest kind of elk to be found—they could mix with Roosevelt elk, for example, and produce a kind of designer hybrid, like a Yorkie-poo or a Labradoodle. A “tuleroose elk,” maybe.)
Edmiston opposed all population control measures. She called Fish and Game’s culling efforts “arbitrary,” heaped scorn on the local agriculture industry, and accused hunters of being “gunners eager for trophy.” She said that the “ghost herd” was seldom seen by local residents and was “few in number and fearful for survival.” This came as news to the residents of the Owens Valley, who were desperately trying to find a compromise, as they felt themselves overrun. In 1970, an Interagency Committee on Owens Valley Land and Wildlife was formed, which included the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the California Department of Forestry, Inyo National Forest, the United States Bureau of Land Management, Inyo and Mono counties and the University of California.
Elk expert Dale McCullough wrote of the committee: “[Its activities] dramatically illustrate how local city, county, state and federal agencies can work together toward a common goal.” Based on McCullough’s work, a plan was developed by which elk would be divided into separate herds throughout the valley. But the very next year in 1971, thanks to Edmiston’s efforts, the California legislature passed the Behr Bill, prohibiting the hunting of tule elk until the statewide population reached two thousand, or until no further unoccupied elk habitat could be found. With no predators and plenty of feed, it was clear that Fish and Game needed to relocate a large number of animals in order to avoid a catastrophe. But there were not enough suitable places. So, in 1976, the same year that Point Reyes National Seashore started culling the fallow and axis deer, Congress enacted Public Law 94-389, requiring the Department of the Interior to make land available for the tule elk on military bases and in national parks. Point Reyes National Seashore was on the list.
Their reserve was to be on Tomales Point, where J.V. Mendoza once made butter in an open barn. The ranch that sixteen-year-old Zena, fresh off the boat from Portugal, had refused to stay in as a tenant farmer for the rest of her life, was turned into historic park buildings the same year the elk arrived. The first herd to occupy the fenced 2,600-acre paddock was small, with just two males and eight females. During their first years in the seashore, the population struggled to overcome what biologist McCrea Cobb referred to in a study of the elk as “inbreeding depression,” and their numbers were slow to climb. Then the appearance of incurable Johne’s disease, which causes severe diarrhea in elk, deer and livestock, and can be fatal to animals under six months of age, made matters worse. The park discussed eliminating the elk herd entirely. Cobb, who studied the seashore’s elk from 2005 to 2008, said that after overcoming their genetic hurdle, and after a drought in the 1980s, the elk experienced what he described as “irruptive growth.”
“None of the existing predators appear capable of regulating an elk population,” he wrote in his dissertation at the University of California, Berkeley. “Irruptive population growth patterns, observed at [Point Reyes] and typified by newly established ungulate populations that are free of predation pressure, can lead to adverse habitat and population-level effects.” Cobb identified three distinct herds, which he called Tomales Point, Limantour and D Ranch herds. He observed that the herd in the pastoral zone was definitely growing the fastest.
“The herd near the ranches grew 300 percent in five years,” he told me in a phone conversation in 2012 from Alaska, where he was then studying wolves. “The Limantour herd is growing much more slowly, and that is due to habitat. The elk far prefer the flat grasslands. Any expansion of that herd is likely to go onto the pastoral zone as well. [ . . . ] I predicted irruptive, rapid growth.”
In his dissertation he wrote that future growth was likely to result in conflicts between park management and ranchers, unless proactive actions were taken. However, he said park officials were wary of taking action based on his findings.
“How do I say this? I think they acknowledged that the population would increase and that the results that I found were true,” he told me. “At the time they didn’t want to take proactive management actions based on my results. Exactly what they would do based on my findings was unclear.”
“You don’t want to have more animals than the land can support,” Jeff Cann of Fish and Game told me in 2012, of the importance of knowing the land’s carrying capacity. “There are places where we can only sustain so many elk.”
A 1998 seashore brochure described the elk at Tomales Point as living in “a virtual paradise,” and said the herd had surpassed 500 animals. By contrast, Monterey County had four hundred to five hundred tule elk in 2012, ranging on 165,000 acres of the Fort Hunter Liggett military base—more than sixty-three times the space given to the Tomales Point population. Even so, local agencies were trying to reduce the herd.
“We don’t want [the Monterey] population growing any bigger,” Cann said. “We’d actually like to start tapering it off.” His response to the size of the Tomales Point herd? “Wow.”
There were just sixty elk in Point Reyes in 1986, but by 1992 that number had more than doubled to an estimated 160 animals. Seashore officials in the early 1990s wrote that their numbers were “soaring,” and a 1992 Environmental Assessment of the elk considered reintroducing grizzly bears to the seashore, though that option was dismissed as “unfeasible.” There was no mention of eliminating the ranches in the more recent study. Ultimately, as had been done with the fallow and axis deer since the 1970s, the seashore concluded that culling the elk was the only viable option. While elk elsewhere in the state were being shipped to other reserves when necessary, it was, and continues to be, forbidden to move elk from Point Reyes due to their exposure to Johne’s disease. In 1992, ranger Bill Shook told the Point Reyes Light that the disease even made relocating the herd within the seashore impossible, although that would not prove to be the case after additional assessment. Furthermore, the 1992 Environmental Assessment said that if the elk were allowed to roam freely outside of the fenced reserve, “impacts to ranches will include forage competition, fence damage and crop depredation,” not to mention the spread of Johne’s, for which there is no reliable test.
But again, as was the case with the exotic deer, animal rights groups got wind of the proposed cull and objected. Still, the 2,600-acre preserve had an estimated 140-animal carrying capacity, and something needed to be done.
“I don’t want the elk to eventually starve,” then-superintendent John Sansing said. The park hired sharpshooters to cull the elk for a time, but stopped due to public outcry. In 1993, the lobby group begun by Beula Edmiston stepped in and began supplying the seashore with information on experimental programs in wildlife contraception, and said their fifty thousand members would pay for birth control. “[The tule elk] are an ideal population for contraception pilot study and future research,” the group wrote to Sansing. The contraception program was tried briefly, but ultimately abandoned as expensive and unreliable. In 1993, there were 221 elk in the park. By 1997, there were 465. In 1998, the park decided to establish a second elk colony in the wilderness area.
A 2001 article in the San Francisco Chronicle titled “Running Out of Room to Roam” said that the exploding elk population was pushing the limit statewide. The seashore was similarly pressed, but the next year, park scientists said that the Tomales herd was now holding steady at 450 animals.
Mammals are not the only things that the park must seek to curate. Out past where the sedges and bunchgrass near Abbotts Lagoon give way to rolling dunes, endangered plants have been struggling to survive an onslaught of invasive European beachgrass. Familiar to residents and seashore visitors, the European grass has been making its glacial advance since it was first planted in the late 1800s, and crowding out everything in its path. This includes the Tidestrom’s lupine, a plant that is delicate and low to the ground, with small purple flowers and soft, silvery leaves that feel like velvet.
From January to July 2011, the park bulldozed over a hundred acres of beachgrass-covered dunes, as part of a large-scale restoration experiment. All of the vegetation was churned deep under the sand, and the rhizomes, the stubborn root-like tendrils of the grass that can extend more than nine feet below the surface, were either destroyed by the excavators or pulled out. Without the grass’s tenacious grasp, the dunes dissipate and blow flat, and the team of biologists then waited to see what native plants, if any, decided to take up residence there. But the process must be “natural,” and scientists won’t place the plants themselves. When I visited the site in 2012, small fields of the endangered Tidestrom’s lupine had taken root and were blooming.
In fact, the majority of Point Reyes’s grasses are not native, but were brought from the Mediterranean, both on purpose and accidentally, smuggled in the digestive systems of livestock. When the fallow deer grazed the hillsides, they were Mediterranean deer, eating Mediterranean grass. Many of America’s most iconic plants and animals are not native. The ubiquitous tumbleweed of the American Southwest is a monumentally invasive species from Russia, a stowaway in nineteenth-century grain shipments. The apple tree, of course, is also not native to the Americas, even though nothing is more American than apple pie. In every sense we are a country of immigrants.
At the end of the nineteenth century, a group called the American Acclimatization Society took it upon itself to introduce to the United States every bird mentioned in the works of Shakespeare. His plays and sonnets contain some six hundred references to birds. This meant not just rarer birds like Juliet’s nightingale or Romeo’s lark, but Hamlet’s sparrow and Hotspur’s starling, two birds that would conquer North America. The starling, although mentioned just once by Hotspur in Henry IV, Part I (Act 1, Scene 3), is now one of the most numerous birds in the United States and Canada. A flock of between sixty and one hundred was released by the Society in Central Park in the late 1800s, and just over a century later there were estimated to be more than two hundred million of them, ranging from Florida to Alaska. Small but tough, they are the bruisers of the avian world (and perhaps a fitting bird for the Earl of Northumberland’s hotheaded eldest son), and compete with native hole-nesters, including many Red-headed Woodpeckers, Purple Martins and Bluebirds, contributing to those species’ decline. Starlings steal grain, wreck crops, and cost the United States $1 billion annually in farm damage. In 2012, the USDA killed nearly 1,500,000 of them via shooting and trapping, still less than 1 percent of the population. They are an otherwise impressive bird, with iridescent feathers and varied calls. Mozart had a pet starling that, when it died, he buried with great ceremony. Such are the perils of romanticism.
Other parks are less squeamish about managing their ungulates. Grand Teton National Park, for example, keeps its elk population in check through an annual public hunt, open to anyone with a valid Wyoming elk hunting license and a permit. But California’s Bay Area is not a popular hunting region, and as previously stated, some locals were against killing the animals for any reason at all.
In 2007, Fred quickly found that his constituency was split on the issue. The park had recently announced the results of its more-than-decade-long assessment: It would eliminate all of the exotic deer from the park. NPS spokesperson John Dell’Osso described a fifteen-year phase out that he called “the final plan.” By “final” he meant that it was no longer being debated, but that media picked up on and darkly referred to as “the final solution.” Now that elk had been transported (individually airlifted, no less) to the wilderness area, there was a chance the exotic deer could also compete with the elk, a protected native animal. The Marin Conservation League and the Sierra Club both supported the exotic deer cull plan. The Audubon Society supported it too, saying that sterilization would be “more stressful” for the animals—although that depends on your definition of “stress,” since death is, by and large, considered to be a pretty traumatic event.
The park estimated that there were around 1,500 exotic deer in the park in 2007. The solution, as communicated to the public, would be to capture eighty to one hundred females and inject them with a drug to prevent pregnancy. The rest of the deer would be shot, over a span of years. Still, the end result would be the same: eventually there would be no more fairytale deer in Point Reyes. Many locals were appalled. Point Reyes Station resident Trinka Marris spearheaded a campaign called Save the White Deer, putting pressure on the park to keep the exotic herd but reduce its numbers through non-lethal methods. The Humane Society, In Defense of Animals and WildCare formed a coalition called Friends of the White Deer, and advocated to stop the killing, too. A columnist for the Marin Independent Journal, Barry Tompkins, joked that a contraception program was unlikely to be effective, because how were the deer expected to be able to put on condoms? He suggested the park buy the deer televisions, so that they’d start watching Dancing with the Stars and stop having sex.
The cull project had a budget of $75,000, and word broke in early summer 2007 that the park would hire an outside contractor to get the job done. One of the companies said to have been up for the assignment was Prohunt Incorporated, a New Zealand–based firm that specialized in the elimination of feral animal populations. It had recently been paid $3.9 million to rid the Channel Islands of feral pigs. In 2006, a similar campaign was carried out on Isabela Island in the Galápagos, where feral goats had decimated local flora and were crowding out the famed tortoises.
There is no way around it: it is a brutal process, the total elimination of a population. Prohunt chief executive Norm Macdonald talked to the San Francisco Chronicle in 2007 about the “eradication ethic” and the firm’s work with pigs on the Channel Islands.
“It’s those little tiny piglets, the ones just big enough to survive on their own, that are the toughest to get,” he said.
To root out the stragglers, firms like Prohunt use what is called “the Judas method,” whereby a female animal is captured, sterilized, given estrogen boosters, and released with a tracking device.
“Then we drop them all over the range and let them lead us to the stragglers,” Macdonald told the Chronicle.
The eradication programs were carried out from helicopters, with high-powered rifles, which suddenly made the thought of a park ranger singlehandedly shooting a deer every few weeks in the early morning hours seem like not such a big deal after all. There were roadside signs opposing the cull, and newspaper editorials, and town meetings. Even now, when I bring up the exotic deer extermination, Point Reyes park staff tend to get a little uncomfortable. It was just so unpopular. In July of 2007, California representative Lynn Woolsey got involved. She sent a letter to Superintendent Neubacher, urging him for a reprieve.
“There is no urgency to move forward,” she wrote. But she was wrong: her very involvement signaled just how urgent it was. Trinka of Save the White Deer also hoped that time would prove to be on their side.
“It’s going to be a fifteen-year project,” she told a local newspaper, referring to the announced final plan. “So I think the public has plenty of time to put pressure on the park to use contraception in a larger role than they intend to. We’re just beginning.”
Unfortunately for advocates of the exotic deer, white or otherwise, the plan did not actually say that it would take them fifteen years to complete the eradication plan; it said that they had fifteen years in which to eliminate the deer, not that it needed to take them that long to do so. In August of 2007, the park hired a Connecticut-based deer management company called White Buffalo Inc., and things started to move very, very quickly.
The deer were shot from helicopters in droves. They were shot in the meadows, and on hillsides, and near beaches, and at the edge of forests. Unlike the native black-tailed deer, the exotics were more likely to appear in large family groups, and this was to the exterminator’s advantage. The public was told that the “sharpshooter,” a term that invokes the precision of a sniper, would instantly kill the deer with a shot to the head. But this did not seem to be the case in practice. Fred heard from distraught members of the EAC, many of them avid hikers, that white deer and other exotics were being found injured and dying with wounds to the abdomen. The fairytale deer staggered onto the roadsides, breaking, in their last confusion, the rule they had always kept of keeping out of sight. Being August, that spring’s fawns were just old enough to survive on their own, and the sharpshooter had to be certain to kill all of these, too.
While some of the meat was donated to local homeless shelters and a California condor recovery program, much of it was left where it lay. Either the terrain was too rugged, or a mortally wounded animal managed to escape and die alone in some remote place, its body returning to the earth; foreign deer to feed the foreign grasses.
A small herd of female exotic deer remains in the park to this day. Some are sterilized, and still wear their Judas radio transmitters around their necks. They keep to a southern corner of the park, near where a Hindu foundation called Vedanta has maintained a religious retreat center since the 1940s. The center was granted a federal dispensation when the park formed around it, and is open to all faiths. It is also open to all deer, since it refused to allow the killing of any deer on its lands. Now the remaining fallow and axis deer shelter there. There are no fawns now, only the group of remaining females; the ghosts of the ghost deer. While it’s possible there are still more white deer hiding elsewhere in the National Seashore, there hasn’t been a sighting of a stag in years.