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,…