Sparsely, Sage and Timely
When the park gets your goat
I have recently been bemused to hear a few Point Reyes National Seashore staff and colleagues complain that this small-town weekly keeps beating up on the park. Just look, they say:
• The Light gave an awful lot of coverage to a couple of law-enforcement rangers pepper-spraying two Inverness Park teenagers last July. The teenagers, of course, were not on park property and were never charged with any wrongdoing. They were merely bystanders who asked questions during a very minor law-enforcement matter.
• Every time the National Seashore razes another piece of history prized by West Marin residents, such as the 120-year-old hamlet of Hamlet, The Light makes a big deal out of it and editorializes that the park administration is being insensitivite to local history.
• Now that the park administration has again proposed eliminating fallow and axis deer herds in the National Seashore, The Light has again editorially sided with animal-rights groups and a host of West Marin residents who consider the mass killing cruel and unnecessary.
But does all this make The Light an adversary of the Point Reyes National Seashore? That’s like saying this paper is an adversary of the County of Marin, the State of California, and the United States of America since The Light from time to time points out failings by each of them.
A few people seem to forget that the Point Reyes National Seashore is a large government agency with a hundred employees and $5 million budget. This unit of the Department of the Interior oversees an area three times the size of San Francisco, along with almost 2.5 million visitors a year. The Point Reyes National Seashore does many things, most of them good, a few of them bad.
For four years before he became National Seashore superintendent in 1995, Don Neubacher was deputy general manager of the Presidio, where he was in charge of development and leasing (to Lucasfilm and other corporations) the former Army base turned park. Neubacher is used to wheeling and dealing, and the Park Service considers him an up-and-coming administrator. This year he’s being prepared for the "Senior Executive Civil Service," the top position below a presidential appointee.
In short, he’s a big boy, and when it comes to the killing of deer in his park, the buck stops with him.
Now that Supt. Neubacher is again proposing to save a few thousand dollars a year by eliminating foreign deer from the National Seashore, some park researchers and their colleagues see his proposal as a great opportunity. They’ve always talked as if most of the National Seashore were pristine wilderness where deer from other countries are trespassing.
Calling the fallow and axis deer non-native, however, is a misnomer since the herds were residents on Point Reyes well before Supt. Neubacher was born. They’ve been frequently called more native to Point Reyes than the Park Service; indeed, the National Seashore was created in 1965 after several generations of axis and fallow deer had lived their lives on Point Reyes.
When interim Supt. John Dell’Osso claims the population of exotic deer in the park has now ballooned to where there is now an urgent need to get rid of them, that’s malarkey. There were 200 more exotic deer in the National Seashore 20 years ago before the herds were culled.
The public-be-damned herd mentality of anti-exotic deer people has always been striking. In October 2000, Point Reyes Station resident Eden Clearbrook told the park’s now-defunct Citizens Advisory Commission she was charmed by the "dignity and grace" of the exotic deer in the National Seashore. "Some of the most magical experiences I’ve had are with the fallow deer," she said.
Her comment immediately drew a written rebuke from a National Seashore biologist, who mocked Clearbrook’s having been enthralled by what she’d seen: "A white deer! Big deal. The fallow deer are just a tourist attraction..."
Earlier that year, West Marin had learned about a similar bit of the park’s resource management ad absurdum. As it happened, a Palo Alto reader wrote The Light, asking whatever happened to a small flock of feral goats that for most of a century had lived north of Kehoe Beach. To catch a glimpse through the fog of a lone goat looking out over the ocean had been a rare treat.
Another reader responded that "the feral goats were introduced by the dairy ranchers in the early 1900s for the purpose of eating the grass along the cliff edge ... Cattle were being lost by venturing too close to the edge and having the cliff crumble under foot."
This response, in turn, prompted people living in the park to reveal that the goats had been covertly eradicated by the National Seashore. A rancher said that in the 1980s, his family used to see 13 goats on around their ranch, but only two or three had been seen in recent years.
His wife added that sometime between the early 1970s and early 1990s, rangers decided "they didn’t want [the goats]. I don’t know why. They didn’t bother anything and stuck to one hill." When her family objected to the flock’s being killed off, she said, rangers simply shot all the bucks, ensuring the flock would soon die out.
This sort of species-cleansing by the park is simply fanaticism. Eradicating of the National Seashore’s tiny flock of feral goats or its two herds of foreign deer is not "resource management." It’s ideology run amok.
Of course, The Light is concerned by all this. So is much of West Marin. But could this three-person newsroom – even if it wanted to – bully a 100-employee government agency that has a $5 million budget? Get real.