It was, by any measure, a wildly successful experiment. In 1978, the National Park Service released 10 tule elk—rangy, doe-eyed creatures once thought to have gone the way of the unfortunate dodo—into a fenced 2,600-acre preserve on a former dairy farm at the northernmost tip of the Point Reyes peninsula. The elk thrived, taking easily to an ecosystem that generations earlier supported herds of them.
In the most recently published census, conducted in 2023, the animals numbered more than 700.
The elk’s return is one of the more astonishing conservation stories in California history, and it set a precedent that wildlife advocates are now hoping to build upon.
A new report sponsored by the conservation group Turtle Island Restoration Network investigates the reintroduction of seven other mammal species to the park. Written by Alexis Evripidou, a wildlife rehabilitation technician, and Richard Lanman, a historical ecologist, the paper explores the possibility of returning Point Reyes to something closer to its wilder roots.
“We’ve had this wildly successful rewilding at Point Reyes,” Dr. Lanman said. “Point Reyes seems like the perfect place for future efforts—it is a safe place, with a really great climate for grazers and many other species, and, surrounded by water on three sides, it’s almost an island.”
The report evaluates the cases for reintroducing the sea otter, beaver, pronghorn, Douglas ground squirrel, Humboldt marten, fisher and porcupine, most of which were once present on Point Reyes but have since disappeared. It draws on existing research and a survey of nine ecology and wildlife experts who ranked species across 12 criteria, including ecosystem value, economic value, habitat suitability, climate resilience and the risk of human-wildlife conflict.
It arrives in the wake of the landmark legal settlement that will leave Point Reyes almost empty of commercial ranching for the first time in nearly two centuries. For years, tule elk were the subject of a bitter conflict between ranchers and environmentalists who argued that the park service, by restricting the herd, subordinated wildlife to agriculture. Elk were one of the central issues in the 2022 lawsuit that led to the settlemen. In the end, the elk, or really their champions, played a part in the ranchers’ undoing.
With the Nature Conservancy now co-managing the vacated pastures, the shift in park priorities opens a larger query. The authors ask: “Since the land will be vacated by its most recent settlers… what do we do with the land now?” (The report was not commissioned by the National Park Service or the Nature Conservancy, though Turtle Island has shared it with both.)
The proposal is similar to other nationwide “rewilding” projects—a faddish and elastic term that covers everything from bringing wolves back to Yellowstone to cemeteries swapping manicured lawns for drought-resistant shrubs. At Point Reyes, rewilding could mean restoring species that vanished during the fur trade and Gold Rush eras, when settlers transformed the West Coast.
Any such project must resist the pull of an illusory, pristine past, Dr. Lanman said. “We have to look at only the last couple hundred years, 1800 and on, because the climate has changed too much,” he said.
Scientists widely agree that landscapes free from human touch simply do not exist—and, in most cases, have not for millennia. Ken Bouley, executive director of Turtle Island Restoration Network, is quick to say rewilding is far from a quixotic quest for a lost Edenic wilderness.
“Some people think that environmentalists just have this naïve view of creating a pristine wilderness,” he said. “We understand that there are human impacts here, so the goal is not to capture some millennia-ago ideal state—the goal is to see what ecosystem engineers we can put back in there to enrich the biodiversity and make Point Reyes more of an ark for endangered species.”
To tinker intelligently with nature, as ecology’s forefather Aldo Leopold wrote and Dr. Lanman reiterated, requires the precision of a mathematician “to keep every cog and wheel” in an ecosystem.
“We have to keep everything in balance,” Dr. Lanman said. “Sometimes species that we don’t think are very useful—which is Aldo Leopold’s point, I think—play some crucial role, they provide some ecosystem service.” The disappearance of any species ripples across an ecosystem, up and down the food chain and into the landscape itself. Reintroduction, too, sets ripples in motion.
Of the seven candidates, sea otters and beavers rose to the top as keystone species—named for the outsized roles they play in their ecosystems, producing unexpected and far-reaching consequences for the environment.
Sea otters, once bountiful but virtually wiped out by fur traders, are critical to the health of kelp forests. They prey on sea urchins that otherwise overgraze kelp, allowing underwater forests to grow and shelter diverse marine life and absorb CO2 from the atmosphere. Today’s California sea otter population is believed to descend from roughly 50 animals that evaded capture along the Big Sur coast. Despite growing to a few thousand by the mid-2010s, very few have made their way north of the Golden Gate.
Beavers, too, once thrived across the American West before being decimated by trappers who sold their pelts for felted hats. Beavers are ecosystem engineers, changing the landscape more than any other non-human animal in North America. By felling trees, building dams and reshaping waterways, beavers enrich fish habitat, maintain flows during drought, provide wet firebreaks, improve water quality, increase carbon sequestration and generally enhance habitat for riparian plants and animals.
Marin is the only county north of the San Francisco Bay without beavers. (It is home to an endemic subspecies of mountain beaver, which is not an actual beaver.)
In the park, beavers’ return could be transformative for the federally endangered coho salmon that spawn in Olema and Pine Gulch Creeks. One study conducted in Oregon found that beaver ponds constituted just 2.5 percent of the total habitat in a given watershed but produced more than half of its coho smolts in a single year.
In the 1940s, in Idaho, U.S. Fish and Wildlife parachuted beavers out of airplanes in boxes designed to spring open upon landing. California attempted a reintroduction to Point Reyes that decade, but it didn’t take. A more recent effort—prompted by a Marin Water study that found suitable habitat—stalled. It wasn’t until 2023 that the California Department of Fish and Wildlife conducted its first beaver release in nearly 75 years, placing a family of seven into Plumas County.
The remaining five species present a somewhat more complicated picture. Pronghorn—a small ungulate and the second-fastest land mammal on earth, capable of reaching 55 miles per hour—scored high on economic value, largely because they are spectacular to watch and almost entirely absent from coastal California. Enormous herds once ranged across the state’s interior grasslands, but the case for their historical presence at Point Reyes is contested.
Then there is the fisher, a large member of the weasel family, and the porcupine, which the report recommends reintroducing together. Fishers are the only predators in North America specialized to hunt porcupines. Without them, porcupine populations can grow unchecked and damage forest health. Introduce fishers without porcupines and you deprive them of their primary prey.
Of course, species introduction can have unintended ecological consequences—including extirpating other local species, spreading pests and parasites, and exacerbating human-wildlife conflict.
“Our understanding of the species that were once here is pretty sketchy,” said natural historian Jules Evens, who noted that there is no evidence that martens or fishers ever lived here. “There are often unintended consequences of reintroducing species. If you suddenly bring in a whole bunch of new species, you can throw the whole system out of whack. You have to look at the whole system: the way it was then and the way it is now.”
That caution applies even to the elk—the very mammal whose return made all this imaginable. Reginald Barrett, a professor emeritus of wildlife management at the University of California, Berkeley, has studied the Point Reyes elk since their reintroduction. The animals, he said, returned to a landscape already shaped to their advantage.
“Point Reyes is perfect habitat for the elk, especially when ranchers were doing what they were doing to make it good for cattle,” he said. “If it’s good for cattle, it’s good for elk.”
Yet without sufficient grazing or other active management like prescribed burning, coastal scrub can overtake open grasslands, reducing the forage elk depend on. The park’s management plan predicts that tule elk will reach their carrying capacity in under 20 years.
“With the cows gone, unless they implement a prescribed burning program, the overall carrying capacity for the elk is going to decrease,” Dr. Barrett said.
This article was corrected on April 10. Most of the species evaluated in the report were not endemic to Point Reyes; rather, they were simply once present here.