#by cheatgrass (an invasive)

[ivanaskye]

[awkwardbotany]

What Is Cheatgrass and Why Should I Care?

To understand the current state of rangeland wildfires in the Intermountain West, you must first familiarize yourself with a plant commonly referred to as cheatgrass. This annual grass moved into the region over a century ago, and its spread has had a massive impact on the environment, as well as the economy and our way of life. Just the very mention of cheatgrass in the West will get some…

[sustainabilitythoughts]

Don't release your goldfish

Invasive species, whether plant, animal, fish, reptile, or insect, can cause significant harm to an ecosystem.  While not all invasive species cause serious harm, they all displace native species to some degree.  Displacement of some of the native species in an ecosystem ripples through the other species that rely on that habitat.  And some invasive species are nearly impossible to control and cause serious harm to ecosystems.  The lionfish, an Asian species, has reached new habitat in the western hemisphere, where it has no predators and causes serious harm in coral reefs.  Severe mammal declines in Everglades National Park have been linked to invasive Burmese pythons, which were likely introduced through escapes from the pet trade or when pet snakes were released when they became too big.  Cheatgrass, native to Eurasia and the Mediterranean and now well established in the US, colonizes any open, dry habitat and has the potential to completely alter the ecosystems it occupies by completely replacing native vegetation and changing fire frequency and intensity.  The article below discusses how even the everyday goldfish, a popular small fish kept as a household pet, has become a serious invasive species as people have released unwanted goldfish into the environment. They can grow to more than a foot long and weigh more than three pounds. So, don’t release your goldfish, pet snake, or any other critter into the wild unless it is native to the area.  I’ll cover invasive plants in another post on another day, but invasive plants can have a bigger negative impact on an ecosystem than invasive critters. 

[negativepeanuthoarder]

wait I just put cheatgrass in the dragonlands in my fantasy au, but the dragonlands are inspired by american deserts where cheatgrass is invasive so I guess that's another thing we can blame the empire for :///

also my sister said that putting dingos and coyotes in the same desert was 'unrealistic' so I kindly reminded her that winged humans and magic is ALSO unrealistic so there :3

[art--work]

Also over the winter holidays, I started the process of making paper from an invasive species of grass, Bromus Tectorum (better known as cheatgrass or downy brome), which has effectively taken over, producing significant structural and functional changes to most desert ecosystems in the US. The photos above show a bag of cheatgrass collected adjacent to a recent wildfire in the foothills outside Boise, Idaho, and the cheatgrass fibers being pounded with a rubber mallet. First, the grass was soaked for 24 hours, then cooked in a solution of water and soda ash (sodium carbonate) for two hours. Then, drained, thoroughly rinsed, the fibers were beat thoroughly for 45-50 minutes until the fibers dispersed evenly when added to water. I then dried the mass out in the oven (to prevent it from molding in transit) and stowed it away in my luggage to take back to Oslo. This is only a portion of the grass harvested, processing being limited by the research facilities (a home kitchen and whatever accoutrements I could find around the house).

[eserprogram]

How long are cheatgrass seeds viable?

How long are cheatgrass seeds viable?

Question answered by Kristin Kaiser, Plant Ecologist INL ESER Program Figure 1: Cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum) in mid-July after it has produced seed and is now dead standing plant material found in the Snake River Plain of southeastern Idaho. Photo Credit: Kristin Kaser Cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum L.) is a highly invasive introduced winter annual. It has several common names like downy brome,…

[kinka-juice]

And also ban neonicotinoid pesticides now. You want to know why bug populations have tanked since the 90s? Widespread use of neonics. And it's all over the seeds from greenhouses, too. You want to plant things to help the environment and you can accidentally make it worse.

The only real weeds are actual invasive species. Cheatgrass & tamarisk actually deserve the hate here in the Intermountain west. And even then, these species are fine where they actually belong in the old world.

I think one of the absolute most frustrating things for me personally about the current climate crisis / late stage capitalism hell is that ontop of people just outright denying it and acting like the rising temperatures are normal- there’s been like. A VERY noticeable decline in the amount of insects yearly. As someone who goes out of my way to see bugs, every single year for the past decade there has been a sharp decline in bugs. What used to be fun filled summer months running around, catching grasshoppers and petting caterpillars… there’s nothing. I’ve seen one grasshopper this year. I’ve not seen a single caterpillar! It’s currently the ant nuptial flight season in my area and I’ve seen 0 winged ants. They used to all but infest my home during flight season

I remember as a kid, I used to excitedly find ladybug larvae, and I’d relocate them to plants covered in aphids. But I’ve seen one ladybug in the past 5 years, and 0 larvae. I’ve not even seen any aphids. It’s so tangible, it’s so noticeable to me as someone who considered this my absolute favourite season to do my favourite activity in. And I know if the bugs are dying off, other things that eat those bugs are to.

And the absolute worst part? When I tell people about this, the average reaction is ‘good!’. A lot of people will express joy over there being less bugs in the world. Most will express how they’re glad they’ve been experiencing less mosquitos and I want to just grab by the shoulders and shake them and yell TONS OF BUGS JUST DISAPPEARING SHARPLY OVER THE YEARS IS NOT A GOOD THING !!

Anyways. Fellow entomology nerds, have any of you also noticed a drastic decrease in bugs you’re finding yearly or is my area just in a bug deficit.

[ivanaskye]

[fishst0ckings]

IM BOUTA END THIS MANS WHOLE CARRER:

Dandelions are non-native, but they are not invasive here in Colorado. They do not displace our native plants. They only displace other plants in your non-native lawn that you over-water and cut too short and in disturbed areas like roadsides. If you go out to a healthy prairie you will not see dandelion. I don't particularly like them, and the weird reverence for them over our natives is annoying, but if you want to go to war against invasives your energy is better spent fighting bindweed or cheatgrass. Species that actually displace our natives.

We Can Do Better Than Dandelions

3/24/2018

24 CommentsA growing voice in garden circles dotes on dandelions for pollinators, particularly as they are claimed as the first flowers to bloom in spring. This refers to the exotic dandelion Taraxacum officinale, not one of the native species we have like Nothocolais cuspidata. While early-spring insect species will use dandelion -- especially generalist species and European honey bees who evolved with the flower -- in many cases it is not the most nutritious option when it comes to pollen. For example, according to bee expert Heather Holm, the earlier-blooming and native pussy willow’s pollen protein count is 40%, whereas dandelion is only at 14%. Nutritious pollen is what bees are after; many are out only for a few weeks to mate and provision egg cells as quickly as possible. 

In addition, many specialist bees have evolved relationships with specific native plants, timing their life cycles for when pollen is available from those plants. Specialists are incredibly crucial to keeping the pollinator system in balance, and when we lose even one such species pollination rates for plants suffer. Need one even mention the benefit of native plants as larval hosts to a variety of insects and bugs?

Additional research shows that dandelion pollen has allelopathic properties (which it also has in its roots and tissue), and when spread to other plants reduces seed production.

@dreamsy990

when i was a kid i fell in love with dandelions. when i told my parents, they said they were just weeds, not flowers at all. i was always upset on the dandelions behalf- why didnt people love them too? why were they a problem when they were just as pretty?

[awkwardbotany]

Weeds of Boise: Vacant Lot on West Kootenai Street

Weeds of Boise: Vacant Lot on West Kootenai Street

Every urban area is bound to have its share of vacant lots. These are sites that for whatever reason have been left undeveloped or were at one point developed but whose structures have since been removed. The maintenance on these lots can vary depending on who has ownership of them. Some are regularly mowed and/or treated with herbicide, while others go untouched for long periods of time. Even…

[fatehbaz]

Each year [...], the grouse announce the end of the frigid high desert winters through the males’ springtime courtship dancing on their “lek” breeding grounds. They loudly pop air sacks out from their snowy-white chest feathers and spread their elaborate tail fans [...]. “That’s where we learned to dance,” said Perry Chocktoot, the culture and heritage director for the Klamath Tribes, the local federally recognized nation made up of the Klamath, Modoc and Yahooskin band of the Norther Paiute Indians. [...]

It’s everywhere [...]. Grass between the lava rocks. Grass between the knee-high sagebrush clumps. Little shards of crispy grass stick in your socks after just a few steps. This grass doesn’t belong here. It’s invasive, brought to North America decades ago and scattered across the landscape by livestock and machinery. [...] Now, a remarkable high desert bird, the sage grouse, is at risk of disappearing forever from this rocky wildlife sanctuary — and elsewhere across the West — because of the unrelenting spread of this [...] grass.

All it takes is a spark to ignite catastrophe.

In the summer of 2019, a motorist’s tire blowout started a fire miles away from the Clear Lake National Wildlife Refuge on a Modoc County highway. The fire roared unnaturally fast and hot through the invasive grass, burning the last remaining nesting area for the sage grouse in this part of far Northern California. The next spring, Chelsea Sink, an Oregon State University graduate student who studies the birds, walked through the charred skeletons of the sagebrush that these birds rely on for every stage of their lifecycle.

“In the moment, I was like ‘It’s over,’” she said. [...] Most of the sagebrush that burned still hasn’t grown back. [...]

A few years ago, biologists counted only six [...] grouse dancing here on “The U” at Clear Lake, a 5,500-acre of rock and sagebrush surrounded by a 20,000-acre reservoir.

The U is the only known sage grouse breeding ground left of the 56 leks that were once spread across hundreds of square miles in Modoc and Siskiyou counties, the sage grouse’s western-most habitat in North America.

As recently as 1970, there were close to 14,000 grouse in this portion of Modoc County alone. Less than 1,900 remain statewide. [...]

Clear Lake was once the marshy headwaters of the Lost River, a 60-mile “closed basin” stream that snaked from the mountains of Modoc County through Klamath County, Ore. to Tule Lake in California where it dead-ended. Early during the last century, the federal government built the dam that forms Clear Lake as part of the Klamath Project to irrigate farms. Clear Lake was designated a National Wildlife Refuge in 1911, but during World War II, the military commandeered the area to practice strafing attacks and bombing raids.

The local grouse, known as the Devil’s Garden population, managed to survive in this bombed, dammed and grazed landscape.

The altering of grouse habitats from 150 years of development and agriculture is undoubtedly contributing to the declines. But the most pressing threat stems from [...] that sea of yellow grass choking The U.

The grasses, which infest 100 million acres across the West, have dramatically altered the sagebrush ecosystem. They suck up what little moisture that falls, degrade the Great Basin soil, and choke out the native perennial bunchgrasses. All that crispy fuel in the dry months causes fires to explode with an intensity that’s far more destructive than the fires that burned through the sagebrush from time to time for centuries after the last ice age. The [invasive] grasses were a mix of three types of “annuals,” meaning they germinate from seeds each spring: Medusahead, cheatgrass and Ventenata dubia. Medusahead and cheatgrass, native to Asia and Europe, began showing up in North America in the 1800s. Ventenata, native to Africa, western Asia and southern Europe, arrived as recently as the 1950s. [...]

Much of their efforts in Modoc County have revolved around removing thousands of junipers, the evergreen trees that are common on the edges of high deserts. Juniper trees have over the past few decades increasingly encroached into America’s sagebrush steppes, including at Clear Lake. They compete with other vegetation like sagebrush for water. They also provide ready perches for keen-eyed predatory birds like ravens to be able to scout for an easy meal of sage grouse eggs and hatchlings.

Scientists say the juniper encroachment is due primarily to a century of fire suppression in Western forests. The policy of trying to quickly extinguish every wildfire to protect timber stocks, rather than allowing fires to burn naturally, is a big reason why so many destructive fires have burned in California over the past few years. Before settlers arrives and brought with them invasive grasses, the low-intensity fires that periodically swept through the forests kept the juniper in check. For decades, the federal government’s fire suppression policies allowed junipers to grow without limits. [...]

“It’s a microcosm of what’s going on in the West,” [...]. Invasive grasses and fires aren’t the only threat to the grouse. Development, overgrown forests and a warming climate have collided with bureaucratic vapor-lock, litigation and a political fight over livestock grazing and fossil fuels extraction in the West. [...]

-------

Headline, images, captions, and text published by: Ryan Sabalow. “A remarkable high-desert bird may go extinct in California. What must die to save it.” The Sacramento Bee. 30 December 2020.

[crosspollinated]

Thank you for reading Chapter 2! The main inspiration for this chapter was this article from Inside Climate News: Wildfires fueled by climate change threaten toxic Superfund sites. I will make a blog post soon that talks more about my sources and other background information I want to share about this chapter.

Transcription below the cut.

A screenshot of Violet’s email to Miss Magolia. Behind it is a photo of a dirt trail in the Texas wilds, a photo of a ‘Restricted Area Do Not Enter’ sign, and a distant photo of bellowing smoke from a wildfire. The email reads:

Dear Miss Magnolia,

I’m cc’ing Sage on this since I shadowed him for the day. He’ll add any additional details that I might’ve forgotten.

While our initial mission was to observe the invasive cheatgrass that had taken hold of Campo del Fénix, the wildfire that raged through the Trans Pecos region towards Midland, Texas became our primary concern (for obvious reasons). There are many reasons for the uptick in wildfires around the United States, from invasive plants like cheatgrass which burn extremely fast and hot, to larger factors like climate change creating drier conditions for much longer. Prevention measures include managing invasive flora, controlled burns and education. Long term measures revolve around long term climate change solutions, so there’s not much I could say to the mayor of Midland when I contacted them other than to support those efforts. I also urged her to look over the Forest Service’s guide on Fire Adapted Communities and put these safeguards in place.

The other factor was the Superfund site that we were backed up. Superfund sites are locations contaminated by hazardous substances. When wildfires hit them, it can cause deathly problems. For example, an asbestos dumping site burning could mean asbestos-laden ash to carry for hundreds of miles. Teff really got there right in time to stop a bigger disaster from happening. In my email to the Midland mayor I urged them to push on speeding up the cleanup of the Superfund site.

If I can add… while we were keeping lookout, I saw Palm’s scout Burr and two others fleeing the scene. While not 100% sure of their involvement, the Department of the Interior website states that 9 out of 10 wildfires are started by humans. I believe this is worth looking into further.

Thank you for your consideration,

Violet

--

Ditto.

-Sage

[antoine-roquentin]

The Bureau of Land Management’s latest assault on the West’s biodiverse pinyon-juniper forests and sagebrush communities dwarfs its many predecessors. The Trump regime is finalizing a “Restoration” EIS targeting 38.5 million acres of public land across 6 states – Nevada, Oregon, Idaho, Washington, Utah and California. The 60,156 square mile land area is larger than Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware combined. This wrecking balls’ official title is “Programmatic EIS for Fuels Reduction and Rangeland Restoration”.

BLM’s falsely named “restoration” focuses on woody plant destruction projects that turn beautiful wild places into dirt, grass and often flammable weeds. The beneficiaries of this mammoth taxpayer-funded wildlife habitat destruction scheme will be the 18,000 public lands Welfare Ranchers who have the revocable privilege of holding federal grazing permits. The EIS is a surefire way for cattlemen to maneuver for increased grazing, especially if the “restored” sites become infested with flammable cheatgrass or other weeds. After BLM smashes sagebrush or grinds pine nut forests into wood chips under its new EIS, the agency can turn right around and intensify livestock use in a “targeted grazing treatment” by claiming cows will reduce flammable weeds generated by the project....

The EIS proclaims: The purpose of the project is to enhance the long-term function, viability, resistance and resilience of sagebrush communities through vegetation treatments to protect, conserve, and restore sagebrush communities and to provide for multiple use opportunities. “Multiple use opportunities” = more cows. BLM also states its actions support the goals of the Sage-grouse plans. Regrettably, that’s true. Those plans weren’t based on effectively controlling livestock impacts. Instead, they scapegoated native forests, “unhealthy” sagebrush and wild horses as demons that must be slain or vanquished for the bird to endure, and they gave a big boost to these radical deforestation and sage killing projects.

A BLM modeling scheme (FIAT, Fire and Invasives Assessment Tool) tied to the Grouse plans zeroed in on 5.6 million acres (outside Wilderness, WSAs and ACECs) for various forms of mutilation. Riffing off the FIAT scheme, Trump’s Restoration EIS ballooned the project acreage over six-fold, to 38.5 million acres described as “current and historical extent of sagebrush on BLM-administered land within the project area with wilderness areas, WSAs, ACECs removed”. After BLM tears up the country, it doesn’t even have to seed native plants. Non-native crested wheatgrass and forage kochia can be planted at BLM’s whim if the agency finds “resource management objectives cannot be met with native species”.

Besides bullhogs, bulldozers, chaining, mastication, rollerbeaters, mega-mowers and clearcutting, the EIS’s “prescribed fire” includes broadcast, jackpot, and pile burning and bulldozing fire lines. Doses of chemical cocktails of one or more of the following: 2,4-D, bromacil, chlorsulfuron, clopyralid, dicamba, diuron, glyphosate, hexazinone, imazapyr, metsulfuron methyl, picloram, sulfometuron methyl, tebuthiuron, triclopyr, imazapic, diquat, diflufenzopyr (in formulation with dicamba), fluridone, aminopyralid, fluroxypyr, and rimsulfuron can be applied in both an air and ground campaign – and not just to kill non-native plants. Toxics like Tebuthiuron are used to kill trees and shrubs as a “treatment”. The EIS’s major sleeper element is the transformation of the cows that have caused land degradation and weed proliferation into saviors of the range.

In the Owyhee Canyonlands jackpot burning of ancient Western Junipers, contractors cut down tens of thousands of trees so they fell into ancient trees or covered the ground surface. They were left to dry out for a year. Then napalm ping pong balls lobbed from contractor helicopters rained down on the forest, generating an inferno.

[alexrmann]

LA+Creature Design Competition

Competition: LA+ Creature Competition, 2020, Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania

Above: Original photo by Alan Krakaeur, CC BY-NC 2.0, modified with text overlay

This entry proposes demilitarizing the Yakima Training Center in Eastern Washington's Sagebrush Sea in order to restore habitat and develop a new means of co-existence with Greater Sage-grouse.

The 2020 LA+ CREATURE design ideas competition—the third in the LA+ international series—asked whether we can live with animals in new ways, if we can transcend the dualism of decimation on the one hand and protection on the other, and how we can use design to open our cities, our landscapes, and our minds to a more symbiotic existence with other creatures." Entrants were challenged to:

Choose a nonhuman creature as your client (any species, any size, anywhere) and identify its needs (energy, shelter, procreation, movement, interaction, environment, etc.).

Design (or redesign) a place, structure, thing, system, and/or process that improves your client’s life.

Your design must, in some way, increase human awareness of and empathy towards your client’s existence.

Research

The Yakima Training Center (YTC), a U.S. military installation near Yakima, Washington, is host and parasite to one of Washington State's few remaining viable habitats for the greater sage-grouse, Centrocercus urophasianus. Populations on the YTC have been trending downward for six decades.

Population trend for greater sage-groud in Washington State, 1964-2019. Source:

Estimates for three populations of sage-grouse in Washington, 1980-2012. The Yakima Training Center population has experienced a generalized decline relative to the other two populations. Source:

Cover of competition entry displaying habitat suitability relative to land cover.

Habitat Pressures

The Greater Sage-Grouse experiences a number of habitat pressures at the Yakima Training Center. Although the sage-grouse enjoys human admiration via indigenous ritual and lek voyeurism during the spring mating period, subpopulations throughout the state have been extirpated due to human encroachment and conversion of land to urban and agricultural uses. Artillery and firearms training at YTC renders many square miles unlivable. Fires are a common outcome, some of which escape control. These pressures and the resulting habitat loss are intensified by global warming. These pressures are depicting the following image and described below.

2-page spread from competition entry displaying habitat pressures experienced by greater sage-grouse at the Yakima Training Center.

Militarism

The YTC is host to multiple artillery ranges including a massive "Primary Impact Area" located almost exclusively within the Lmuma Creek Watershed. Active leks have been discovered at the periphery of the impact area.

Geology & Soil

Prehistoric volcanic activity on the Columbia Plateau resulted in multiple layers of subsurface and exposed basalt rendering the top soil thin and relatively dry.

Fire

Wild and anthropogenic fires increase in frequency and intensity as summers become drier with longer periods of drought. These fires contribute to habitat loss and significantly reduce air quality.

Noise Pollution

Noise disturbances disrupt sage-grouse mating. The YTC seasonally prohibits flight over priority sage-grouse habitat conservation areas. Lek voyeurs are instructed to arrive before and leave after the spring morning mating ritual on the lek.

Slow Vegetative Regeneration

The Greater Sage-grouse requires sagebrush for cover and diet. The pace of vegetative regeneration is naturally slow and highly contingent on soil and air moisture, making the shrub-steppe extremely sensitive to fire events.

Physical Disturbance

Construction of roads results in disturbance, inviting invasive species, such as cheatgrass to encroach upon shrub-steppe and bunchgrass habitat.

Agriculture & Grazing

The Columbia Basin Project resulted in the nearly wholesale colonization of greater sage-grouse habitat in Eastern Washington expansion of irrigation and agriculture. Legacy consequences of utilizing the shrub-steppe for rangeland.

Predation & Ecocide

Existing sage-grouse predation management conducted by the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife requires both lethal removal and non-lethal discouragement or relocation of coyotes, ravens, owls, hawks, and others.

Mating & Nesting

Mating and nesting occur in and immediately adjacent to generational leks (from the Swedish "playground"). Reestablishing extirpated leks, like sagebrush germination and survival, has a low success rate. Nearly all females in a Greater Sage-grouse community will selectively mate with only one or two individuals from the male population, significantly reducing genetic diversity.

Ideation for ways to build human empathy for a creature and improve the creature's life.

Design Concept

Demilitarization appears to be the last hope for a recovered grouse community. Using the lek as the central organizing element and as formal inspiration, a program of demilitarization of the Yakima Training Center is envisioned to function as a catalyst for international demilitarization efforts.

War games and military training operations will be converted to lek rehabilitation, shrub-steppe restoration and continued research and monitoring of the sage-grouse populations.

Existing opportunities for lek voyeurism will be preserved and augments by the incorporation of architectonic site features, including low-profile lek observation bunkers and a central rotunda for community events and resources, with particular attention to deprogramming the legacy of toxic masculinity attached to empire building and capitalist ecocide.

2-page spread from competition entry displaying a conceptual (re)assemblage which generates co-existence between humans and greater sage-grouse at the Yakima Training Center.

Assemblage Components

Lek Defense

Military personnel mobilized for landscape restoration practices, barbed wire fence replacement, and defense of lek mating arenas from predation, ecotourist disruptions, prescribed fire, and emergency response.

Lek Voyeurism

Air- and ground-based long-distance lek voyeurism remain a viable activities. A field research program supplements recreational observation with long-term scientific oversight of the Greater Sage-Grouse population.

No-Fly Zone

Airspace above the DMZ is a no-fly zone, ensuring further reductions to potential noise disturbances.

Repurposed Drones

Use of drones and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) should be repurposed and restricted to the scientific study of land and life.

Lek Observation Bunkers

Camouflaged observation bunkers offer outposts for near-field lek voyeurism as well as shelter for field researchers and ordnance removal experts.

Lek Rotunda

A rotunda placed upon an elevated point will serve as a meeting place more distant from leks and other critical habitat. It's circular form will afford panoramic scenery and a central hearth evoking the Terra Amata and the concentric form of a sage-grouse lek.

Next Steps

Exploring the concept of sage-brush as the limits of pre-historic time.

Revisions to the Proposed Assemblage photomontage. Distance to LEK.

More accurate depiction of lek, and reflection in the rotunda architecture.

A more detailed plan of the rotunda.

An exploration of my philosophical limits in terms of anthropomorphicizing the sex of greater sage-grouse through a cis-gendered ideological filter. The purpose is to find a new relationship to gender and a better understanding of sexual evolution.

Incorporation of research the preceded the development of this entry + Darwin + Elizabeth Kolbert into this work's essay.

[borrelia]

"touch grass"? 🙄 umm why don't you "touch" the "cheatgrass" off your boots when youre hiking to prevent the spread of an invasive species that has devastated north american grasslands

[kinka-juice]

hi!! i just found your blog and i'm a wildlife ecology and management major from alabama. my uni is offering an alternate spring break trip for a group of students going to Arches national park to volunteer with the rangers this year... have you ever been? im really hoping i get picked and would love to hear about the place if you have seen it!!

Alas, I'm more a Zion and Bryce Canyon (as in, one is 45 min, the other is 2.5 hrs away), and I haven't gone out to Arches yet. What I know is that it's great (delicate arch is on my license plate), but the whole state is awesome for national parks, national monuments, BLM land, state parks, and more. Grand Staircase-Escalante would be ntnl park quality in any other state, but it would be unfair if we had six national parks, I suppose.

Also, all the parks and other groups (Ie, Utah Department of Wildlife, who run much of the Utah Prairie Dog conservation stuff) have seasonal jobs and internships, typically paid. Often through SCA, or Southern Utah University (you don't have to be a student there). If you want field work experience and like the look of Utah, I recommend it. I loved doing IIC.

There's also opportunities for field work with the Conservation Corps, but it's more maintaining trails and spraying pesticides on invasive plants, like red brome and cheatgrass that cause major fire hazards. Though I know some do desert tortoise work locally.