Sparsely, Sage and Timely
A Taliban beachhead on Point Reyes
Don’t let Point Reyes National Seashore officials fool you. The proposal they aired this past week to eliminate all the fallow and axis deer in the park is not driven by their purported desire to preserve habitat for cows, imported elk, and ubiquitous blacktail deer; their desire is to manage West Marin history on the cheap.
Yes, the deer have become overabundant, but it was the park’s decision to let this happen. When Don Neubacher became National Seashore superintendent in January 1995, culling was eliminated. Now there are 400 more non-native deer in the park than park-management policy calls for, so the park wants to change its management policy so that it can get rid of them all. Why? It’s the almighty dollar again raising its ugly head on Bear Valley Road.
National Seashore officials for years have said it would be cheaper to eliminate the fallow and axis deer than manage the size of their herds. If Supt. Neubacher and his minions have their way, they will eliminate one of West Marin’s historic wonders – merely for the sake of the park’s budget. It is a style of management for which the National Seashore has become notorious.
The operating policy of the Point Reyes National Seashore administration, when it comes to many remnants of West Marin history, can best be described as malicious neglect. Historic stuff is expensive to maintain, so the National Seashore tries to eliminate whatever it can. A couple of well-known examples, just to remind you:
• In 1987, the National Seashore-administered northern region of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area (GGNRA) bought the old North Coast Railway town of Hamlet. It then evicted its residents. Although the 120-year old village was eligible for the National Register of Historic Places, the National Seashore allowed vandals to devastate it. Then citing the devastation as proof there was nothing worth saving, the Park Service 15 months ago demolished the village.
• In 1974, the Park Service bought the historic Randall House in the Olema Valley. Although it was built in the 1880s and was a gem of Victorian architecture, the National Seashore immediately proposed demolishing it. But given its historic value, that couldn’t be done easily. So the National Seashore let folks rip out the home’s carved-wood banisters and other Victorian-era ornamentation. Park staff then boarded up the Randall house and demolished an historic barn behind it. The barn happened to contain a colony of rare bats, and when the Park Service destroyed their habitat, they moved into the house next door. Now, the National Seashore says it can’t renovate the historic Randall House because that would disturb the bats.
The National Seashore administration’s neglectful management of its axis and fallow herds follows the same pattern: don’t take care of business, claim things have gotten out of hand, then set out to destroy those things.
For more than 50 years, fallow and axis deer have part of the history of Point Reyes. The herd of fallow deer, which have palmated antlers like moose, came to Point Reyes from the Near East by way of the San Francisco Zoo. Fallow deer range in color from white, to brown, to black; in fact, a few are spotted. They are easily domesticated, and since the Stone Age, they have been a significant source of food for humans.
The axis deer, which all are spotted, came from India and Sri Lanka by way of the zoo. The males can have immense racks of antlers. Unlike fallow deer, which prefer to scatter through wooded areas, axis deer are most likely to be found in open land, where they stay together for protection.
The two herds found their way to Point Reyes when a rancher named Millard ("Doc") Ottinger in the late 1940s received several of each species from the zoo, which had too many. Ottinger set them free around Mount Vision, so he and his friends could hunt them for sport.
Constant hunting kept the herds small until the Park Service bought the Ottinger Ranch in 1965 and prohibited further hunting. For awhile, no one paid much attention, and the herds grew. In 1976, after a series of hearings, the Citizens Advisory Commission to the GGNRA and Point Reyes National Seashore endorsed a plan for the park to limit each herd to 350 deer through regular culling.
That policy lasted only long enough for the National Seashore administration to decide to spend its culling money elsewhere. By 1984, the herds had grown to 750 fallow and 500 axis deer.
Culling then resumed, but it turned into an annual controversy:
• In 1992, some rangers merely herded the deer into low brush, shot willy-nilly at them, made no attempt to finish off wounded animals, and left them all to rot. A deer with a gut wound can take several painful days to die, and when then-Supt. John Sansing found out what was going on, he acknowledged the rangers were in the wrong and demanded the culling be done in a humane fashion. The culling continued through 1994, after which Supt. Neubacher stopped it.
• In the 1980s and ‘90s, rangers claimed 90 percent of the deer they killed were going to St. Anthony’s Dining Room to feed the poor. However, when The Light in 1992 (after invoking the Freedom of Information Act) was able to check park records for the previous eight months, it turned out that only 29 percent had been ending up at the soup kitchen. Deer slain where rangers would have had to lug them a ways to reach a vehicle were left where they dropped.
• In 1991, the National Seashore’s resource-management specialist while complaining about the expense of managing the fallow and axis herds, said that if they were not eliminated, "we’re going to be in a maintenance mode forever." He subsequently estimated the cost of properly monitoring herd sizes at $40,000 annually and said the park didn’t have enough money for that.
• In 1978, the National Seashore imported tule elk from San Luis Island near Los Banos, Merced County, only to find elk herds also to grow. The Park Service in 1993 assembled a tule elk panel that concluded that the elk herd should "self-regulate" its own size but that rangers should eliminate the fallow and axis deer. The panel chairman went so far as to complain that the National Seashore’s allowing the fallow and axis to live was "due entirely to public interest in viewing them."
Once again the goddamn "public interest" is getting in the way of government policy. Allied with the bean counters in the park administration are a small crowd of Taliban-like zealots, who mostly work for the park or in concert with it. These self-righteous advocates for parkland purity are offended that too many people are enjoying the wrong animals when they visit the National Seashore. Too many visitors wander off enthralled after having seen a white deer when they should instead be seriously watching their steps to avoid stepping on a snowy plover.
Had they been born in Kabul instead of the ‘burbs, the anti-"exotic-deer" zealots would have been in the front line shooting when Afghanistan’s 500-year-old statue of Buddha was vandalized. Foreign deer don’t belong in the USA anymore than statues of Buddha belong in an Islamic-fundamentalist country, it would appear.
Hello? The park is not pristine, and the West Marin history it contains does not belong to the Point Reyes National Seashore administration or its Taliban cohorts. Humans have shaped Point Reyes for 4,000 years minimum, Europeans for at least a couple of hundred. More than 40 percent of the species of plants in the park plants are, by one estimate, non-native. So are countless animals from muskrats, to possums, to red foxes, to cows, to horses, to ranchers, to park rangers, to hikers, to bicyclists, to campers, to birders. No way does the environmental impact of 400 extra deer in the park begin to compare with the impact of the park’s bringing an extra 2.5 million humans a year to Point Reyes. If the park could reduce the number of visitors by 400 a day 365 days a year, it would reduce that throng by only six percent.
Axis and fallow deer are part of a very large mix of non-native creatures in the park, and "just because they happen to be there is not an adequate reason for elimination," commented In Defense of Animals in 1993. "In my opinion," the late outsdoorsman Joe Slattery of Olema added a year later, "those exotic deer are as native as the National Park Service, and more."