Castle Rock National Wildlife Refuge is a small offshore island near Crescent City in northern California that has long been important to both people and wildlife. The Tolowa seasonally used it for hunting and gathering, though they lived on nearby headlands. After white settlement in 1850 devastated the native population, the island passed to the U.S. Government and was later used for sheep grazing, egg collecting, and proposed commercial schemes before protection took hold. Acquired by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service in 1979, it is now one of the Pacific coast’s most important seabird sites, supporting vast nesting colonies, breeding marine mammals, migrating Aleutian cackling geese, and notable coastal geology.