Tule Elk in Point Reyes

By Valentin Kostelnik

In the idyllic grasslands of Point Reyes National Seashore, an hour north of San Francisco, ranchers and environmentalists are battling over how best to use the public land. 28,000 of the Seashore’s total 71,028 acres are leased by cattle ranchers who specialize in fine dairy products and world-famous cheeses. The cattle thrive on the wind-swept grasslands of North Point Reyes, but the grasslands are also home to roughly 580 tule elk, an endangered species of elk endemic to California. During the 2010s, large-scale droughts caused mass die-offs of the tule elk, prompting the Seashore to adopt a policy of annually culling the population. This policy, combined with the die-offs, fanned the flames of a fierce controversy between pro-elk environmentalists and the ranching families leasing the grasslands. Currently, there are two lawsuits against the National Park Service, both seeking to remove the ranchers from Point Reyes and allow the elk populations to expand.

The ranchers claim they are preserving the rich agricultural heritage of the area, supporting sustainable agriculture, and building local food systems. Their opponents claim the ranchers are degrading the land for private profit while consigning the native species to a marginal existence. Both of these things are true. At the heart of this controversy is a question over land-use values: how do we weigh human use of the land against supporting native ecosystems?

The natural beauty of Point Reyes is an extraordinary resource, and anyone would consider themselves lucky to live near it. However, this natural beauty also attracts two groups currently threatening hundreds of rural communities across the US: tourists and vacation home buyers. The towns surrounding Point Reyes, all of which were once agricultural lands, have, in the past 20 years, become prohibitively expensive to live in, with houses regularly selling for seven million dollars or more. Families in these towns are being forced out, and most of the newcomers are extremely wealthy. Seen in this light, the ranching families of Point Reyes are a bastion against the gentrification brought on by the Seashore’s natural beauty.

Ranching has deep roots in Point Reyes, with some families tracing their lineage back to the first dairy ranches of the 1860s. They describe an intimate connection to the land, such as one man who grew up in the Seashore and said that “[you know] every nook and cranny of that place. You drive a tractor before you drive a truck…You’re one with the land…” These ranching families note their economic importance; food produced within the Seashore’s boundaries constitutes roughly 20% of the county’s agricultural output. Additionally, ranchers have consistently highlighted sustainability as a primary goal. All Seashore ranches are organic and have been willing to try methods such as rotational grazing or prescribed fire. Fourth-generation rancher David Evans states: 

Today, my ranch provides habitat for several threatened California native species, including the California Red Legged Frog, is home to several native grasses, and provides pastoral habitat for an extremely diverse ecosystem … We look forward to … securing at least 20-year leases after this planning phase, thereby confirming the critical role that ranching plays in maintaining our thriving and beautiful working landscape. 

Currently, ranches are given five-year leases that have no guarantee of being renewed, and a major goal of the ranchers is to gain 20-year leases and the security they would provide.

On the other hand, because most of the pastoral land in Point Reyes is leased to private ranches, endangered tule elk populations are being killed. The story of tule elk in California is analogous to the story of bison in the Great Plains. Once, they were the primary grazers on most of California, with a population around 500,000, but overhunting and habitat destruction drove them to the brink of extinction. By the 1870s, this vital species was believed to be gone from this world. Then, miraculously, a cattle baron named Henry Miller found a dozen elk on his ranch in Southern California and decided to protect them. By 1914 the herd had grown to about 400, large enough to cause $5,000-10,000 annually in damage to Miller’s cattle fences and irrigation works. Miller requested they be moved to a more suitable location, and relocation efforts led by the California Academy of Science established herds all across the state. Though there have been constant difficulties with overgrazing and conflict with ranchers ever since, the tule elk population has grown to about 5,700 statewide today.

However, continual relocation efforts were required, so, in 1978, the newly-created Point Reyes National Seashore was selected as a reserve. A suitable site was chosen, and a rancher in the far northern tip of Point Reyes was forced to give up his lease on 2,600 acres to make way for the elk. The peninsula, called Tomales Point, is covered in grassland and brush and slopes steeply on both sides down to the ocean. However, ranchers were concerned with the elk disturbing their operations, so an eight-foot high wire fence was built at the base of the peninsula, leaving the elk to their grassy finger of land.

Park scientists predicted the 2,600-acre reserve had a carrying capacity of 140 elk, and that the population would “naturally stabilize” around that number. But the herd grew explosively from 10 elk in 1978 to 550 in 1998, raising alarms for the managers. Following an environmental assessment in 1998, the park moved three dozen elk from the fenced Tomales herd to Limantour Beach, several miles south, in an area reserved for wilderness and absent of ranching. If all went smoothly, these free-ranging elk would spread out into the wilderness area, and the northern grasslands would be left to the ranchers. But, enterprising elk crossed an estuary separating the wilderness from the pastoral zone and started a third herd at Drake’s Beach, in the heart of ranching operations with no elk fences. 

Just as they had with Henry Miller a century earlier, the elk quickly started causing problems for the ranchers. Elk broke through fragile cattle fences and grazed the forage meant for the cattle, forcing ranchers to buy hay and alfalfa. Cows also escaped through the holes made by elk, mixing different cattle herds, breeding at the wrong times, and making precise management more difficult. On at least two occasions, bull elk gored cattle, killing them. Combined with damage to irrigation systems, these issues cost the most affected rancher $30,000.

The next 14 years were characterized by a Seashore paralyzed by bureaucracy. The 1998 plan that established the free-ranging Limantour herd did not plan for free-ranging elk in the ranchlands, and thus did not include that in their initial environmental assessment. If the Seashore made a new plan for the free-ranging elk, then it would be required to go through the long and costly process of completing a new environmental assessment. Instead, they employed such band-aid measures as “hazing,” which entails yelling at elk when they wander too near a ranch. It had no effect.

In 2014, the Seashore finally announced it was drafting a new Comprehensive Ranch Management Plan. It was largely a win for the ranchers because it extended their leases to 20 years, but it sparked the fiercest fight yet when it opened to public comment. To make matters worse, 2015 was one of the driest years in California history, and fenced-in elk at Tomales Point died by the hundreds. Dropping from 585 elk in 2007, only 283 elk remained on Tomales Point in 2015.

However, the free-ranging herds at Limantour and Drake’s Beach weathered the drought much better than the fenced-in herds. Proposals to build elk fences around the free-ranging herds and protect the ranches were therefore met with defiance by environmentalists, who still assert that fences kill elk in drought years.

Prompted by the die-offs and the new Ranch Plan, environmental organizations sued the Seashore in 2016, demanding that the Seashore update its 1988 General Management Plan and fully consider the environmental impact of ranching. In the settlement, the Ranch Plan was dismissed, the ranchers were given 5-year interim leases, and the Seashore was given 5 years to write a new Management Plan. That Management Plan opened to public comment in 2021, beginning the legal and cultural battle still raging today.

The 2021 Management Plan includes three alternative plans for this area, including one that fully removed ranching, and one that fully removed the elk. The park’s preferred plan, and the one they went forward with, extends the ranching leases to 20-year periods. To deal with overpopulation and overgrazing in the Tomales Point herd, the park plans to kill a number of elk every year to keep the population stable. Understandably, environmentalists were enraged.

First, a group of nearby residents sued, saying they were legally harmed by the sight of dead and dying tule elk in a place they visited for its natural beauty. They again cited the park’s failure to update their 1988 Plan, and demanded they include increased protection of tule elk. Inherent in this argument is the removal of the ranching operations. This lawsuit was dismissed by Judge Haywood Gilliam in March of 2023, who said, “The court is not indifferent to the conditions facing the Tule elk … but plaintiffs have not identified a viable legal basis that would entitle them, or the Court, to intervene in the Park Service’s wildlife management decisions.” The plaintiffs, supported by Harvard Law School’s Animal Law & Policy Clinic, appealed this decision, and it is currently still circulating through the California courts.

Meanwhile, a second case was brought against the park by three environmental organizations: the Center for Biological Diversity, the Resource Renewal Institute, and the Western Watersheds Project. In this case, the plaintiffs claim that by extending the leases to 20 years, the Park Service is failing to uphold laws to ensure maximum protection for natural resources. They also demand the ranching leases be terminated, so that tule elk could reclaim Point Reyes. This case hasn’t been decided yet and has the greatest potential consequences for the Point Reyes area.

While the district courts of California decide if the Park Service failed to uphold its directives, the public is left to decide what the Park Service’s land management goals should be. Does it allow for the preservation of a working landscape? Should human interaction with the land that harms that land be allowed? These questions are not merely theoretical, and the answers will determine the future of both ranching and tule elk in Point Reyes. 

On the one hand, ranchers claim they are preserving the county’s working landscape and agricultural heritage while living “one with the land.” On the other, an endangered species is being culled because they cannot expand across Point Reyes’ best grazing land. If Point Reyes should be a purely natural ecosystem where native species can flourish, then ranching clearly must go. But if it should be a working landscape, where human practices like sustainable agriculture can operate alongside natural processes, then we must find a way for elk and ranchers to coexist. The controversy in Point Reyes is a particularly painful example of how these values clash, but similar disputes are being hashed out all across the country. For those studying the environment, deciding where to stand on these issues is difficult, but necessary to being good stewards of the land. H

Art by Cali Wisnosky