“The immense numbers of tule elk in the Central Valley (of California)…rivaled ungulate numbers in Africa’s Serengeti…Gizzly bears would come down to the coast at night and feast on beached whales…The tremendous flocks of geese… could appear in thick cloudlike congregations, so large that the roar of their wingbeats as they took flight was deafening… In 1857…a massive school of smelt and sardines piled up a foot deep on the shore at Crescent City and extended three-fourths of a mile seaward. The fish were so numerous three men found it impossible to row a skiff through them… Joaquin Miller described the head of the Sacramento River as a ‘silver sheet’ because salmon were so abundant. He had seen the stream ‘so filled with salmon that it was impossible to force a horse across the current.’… One North Fork Mono/Chukchansi elder, Pauline Conner, reminisced about the time long ago when wildflowers covered vast areas of grassland and ‘butterflies were so thick they would come in clouds, and you could reach out and touch them.’”
- Tending the Wild, M. Kat Anderson
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