Wildlife and land managers say they are seeing gradual acceptance and improvements in public education and outreach for grizzly bear conservation, but there also are setbacks in some areas, most notably the proliferation of bear-attracting chicken coops across Western Montana.

“The hobby chicken farmer is one of the greatest threats to the grizzly bear these days,” Chris Servheen, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service grizzly bear recovery coordinator, said Wednesday in Hungry Horse.

Servheen was one of the speakers during a meeting of the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem subcommittee, a multi-agency panel that guides bear conservation and management.

As state grizzly bear management specialist Jamie Jonkel puts it, “chickens are the new garbage.”

“Bears and chickens are bad,” Confederated Salish-Kootenai tribal biologist Stacy Courville said, adding that to bears, chickens are “like crack.”

Courville would know, because tribal wildlife officials have been responding to a growing number of bear-chicken conflicts in the Mission Valley over the past decade.

“Every year, we go to more and more chicken coops,” he said.

The typical response is to help the chicken owners set up electric fencing to discourage future bear raids. Sometimes the work is done with the assistance of subsidies from Defenders of Wildlife.

But Courville noted that it’s an ongoing challenge.

He cited the not-so-unusual example of new coops popping up on properties — without fencing — the year after a neighbor’s chicken coop was raided by a bear.

Tim Manley, the bear management specialist for the Flathead Valley area, said chicken problems are widespread.

Just in recent days, a grizzly bear killed guinea hens a mile north of the Meadow Lake subdivision outside Columbia Falls.

On Wednesday morning, he got a report of a sheep being killed by a bear about a mile north of where the hens were killed. He suspects the same bear — a large male grizzly — was responsible for both incidents.

There has been noticeable progress for bear managers, however, on the issues of food and garbage storage and the use of electric fencing and bear spray as effective means for preventing bear conflicts.

One of the tougher sells has been convincing hunters that bear spray is a more effective form of defense than firearms. Studies have found that sprays are far less likely to miss and are highly effective in warding off aggressive bears without the potential for seriously wounding or killing the animal.

There was a consensus that older hunters are more likely to believe that firearms are more effective, partly because Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks has made bear spray discussions part of its mandatory, statewide Hunter Education program.

The bear managers said there is growing acceptance and interest in the use of bear-proof garbage containers.

On the Flathead Reservation, tribal wildlife managers have distributed about 300 bear-proof containers where they are most likely to be needed.

“We need about 3,000 more,” Courville quipped.

It was noted that garbage pickup companies and stores such as Murdoch’s, have stepped up to provide bear-proof containers or electric fencing.

Manley said that in the last week, five people have called him asking where they can get bear-proof containers. He suggested that people are willing to purchase and use them, but there will be a challenge in helping people acquire them.

Also at Wednesday’s meeting, Servheen discussed the ongoing process for a potential de-listing of grizzly bears in the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem.

Last year, a draft environmental impact statement was released for a “conservation strategy” for grizzly bears, which is a prerequisite to any de-listing. Public comments are being incorporated into a final environmental impact statement, which will come out this summer, with a final decision soon to follow.

The conservation strategy then would be adopted as amendments to forest plans for the Flathead, Lewis and Clark, Lolo and Helena national forests.

A tandem requirement for potential de-listing is a “threat analysis”  that will get underway next year, Servheen said.

The analysis considers threats related to the size of the grizzly population itself, habitat to support that population and whether there are adequate regulatory mechanisms to protect the population.

The conclusion of the threat analysis, sometime in 2016, will lead to a decision on whether or not to proceed with removing grizzly bears in the Northern Rockies from their protected designation as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act.

Jim Mann writes for The Daily Inter Lake