06/08/2026
In 1978, ten tule elk were hauled to the northern tip of Point Reyes and released behind a fence. Eight females. Two males. Every one of them descended from a bottleneck so narrow that the entire subspecies may have passed through three animals in the 1870s.
Three elk in a marsh on a cattle baron's ranch in the San Joaquin Valley, breathing while the rest of California assumed they were already gone.
Tule elk are not regular elk living in California. They are California's elk, a smaller subspecies found nowhere else, endemic to the state the way the island fox is endemic to the Channel Islands. Before the Gold Rush, early accounts placed the population around half a million animals spread across the Central Valley, coastal grasslands, and tule marshes. Hide hunters, market hunters, agriculture, and cattle ranching collapsed that number so fast that by 1870 the species was considered extinct.
Then in 1874, ranch workers draining a marsh on Henry Miller's cattle empire near Buena Vista Lake found several elk still alive in the reeds. Miller was the largest landowner in California, a man whose operation had helped convert much of the state's wetland country into ranch and farmland. He chose to protect the last elk on his property. By 1905, the remnant had grown to about 140 animals. Genomic research published decades later would confirm how close it had actually been. DNA analysis of the modern tule elk population shows homozygosity levels consistent with a founding bottleneck of as few as three individuals. Every tule elk alive today, all five thousand of them across twenty-two herds, descends from that marsh.
Early attempts to move the growing herd to new locations were rough. From 1914 to 1934, the California Academy of Sciences relocated 235 elk to twenty-two sites, sometimes using ropes and horses, sometimes losing animals during capture and transport. Many of those early transplants failed entirely.
In 1976, Congress passed Public Law 94-389 directing federal land to be made available for tule elk preservation. Two years later, ten elk from the San Luis National Wildlife Refuge near Los Baños were captured and released at Tomales Point, the wind-beaten northern tip of the Point Reyes Peninsula. Eight females, two males. The park revoked the cattle grazing lease on the land, installed an eight-foot fence across the base of the point, and put the elk on the ocean side.
The fence was the compromise. Dairy ranchers held leases across much of Point Reyes National Seashore and did not want elk competing with their cattle. The elk got 2,600 acres of coastal grassland bounded by ocean on three sides and fence on the fourth. The ranchers kept everything south of the line.
At first the elk struggled. One of the original ten died in March 1980 from emaciation and diarrhea. Three additional males were brought in from the Central Valley in December 1981 to add genetic diversity to a founder group that was already dangerously small. The herd grew slowly through the 1980s, then hit exponential growth when the rains returned in the early 1990s. By 1998, the Tomales Point herd had passed 500 animals.
That is when the fence became a trap. Five hundred elk on 2,600 acres of coastal grassland is not sustainable. The elk ate the forage down. Drought years hit. The herd crashed. It recovered. It crashed again. The boom-and-bust cycle repeated three times in twenty-five years. During the severe drought of 2015, the Tomales Point herd dropped to 283 animals. Elk were dying of dehydration and malnutrition behind a fence on a national seashore while the Pacific Ocean pounded the cliffs a quarter mile away. The park installed emergency water systems in 2021 after federal lawsuits and public pressure forced the issue.
In 1998, managers moved twenty-eight elk from Tomales Point into the Limantour Wilderness south of the fence to establish a free-ranging herd. Some of those animals crossed Drakes Estero and established a third group near Drakes Beach. The free-ranging herds fared differently than the fenced herd. They moved. They found water during drought because they could walk to it. Their densities stayed lower because the landscape was larger. The fence at Tomales Point was not protecting the elk from anything. It was protecting the dairy ranchers from the elk.
In January 2026, the National Park Service announced the fence is coming down. After two years of public comment, 35,000 letters, and a final management plan, NPS confirmed it will remove the two-mile, eight-foot fence and allow the Tomales Point elk to roam free across Point Reyes for the first time since 1978. The water systems installed during the drought will also be removed once the elk can move to natural water sources on their own. The Tomales Point herd, which carries the lowest genetic diversity of any tule elk population in California because it descends from ten animals placed behind a fence forty-eight years ago, will finally be able to mix with the free-ranging herds elsewhere in the park.
Tule elk exist in no other national park in the country. They exist nowhere outside California. They passed through a bottleneck of possibly three animals in a marsh that a cattle baron chose not to drain. Ten of their descendants were fenced onto a coastal point in 1978 and spent nearly half a century proving that the land could hold them, and also proving that a fence can protect a species and starve it at the same time. The fence is coming down. The elk will walk south for the first time since the dairy ranchers drew the line.
Source: National Park Service, Point Reyes National Seashore / California Department of Fish and Wildlife / Sierra Club / Resource Renewal Institute.
