Who in Nichols Hills is responsible for the coyote you hear yipping behind the hedges on Grand Boulevard? Under the plan the City Council adopted at its Tuesday, October 13 meeting, the answer is mostly you.

The 2026 Nichols Hills Coyote Conflict Management Plan is built so that the city handles a narrow set of cases. Residents handle everything that happens before one of those cases comes up. The plan's own calendar also puts the next five months among the stretches when that everyday work counts most for anyone walking a dog.

A Second Plan In Two Years, Same Small Role For City Hall

Nichols Hills has done this before. In May 2024, OKC Friday reported that the council approved a nine-page Coyote Management Plan, requested by council member Steve Goetzinger after reports of coyotes in the city. Like the new one, it drew on material from the Humane Society of the United States. At the time, City Manager Shane Pate described the volume of complaints this way at the May 14, 2024 council meeting:

"I don't believe we've had many complaints about coyotes recently. We had a complaint filed a year or two ago, and then seasonally we would receive notice of a coyote."

The 2026 version, announced on the city's news page on October 15, says it aims to protect residents' "public health, safety, and welfare" while balancing human safety with regional ecology. It covers community education and specific responses to sightings, pet attacks and aggressive behavior. Its cover says the city "adopts the following from the Humane Society of the United States."

What the city itself will do stays narrow. The plan says Nichols Hills Animal Welfare "only picks up wild animals that are injured or have bitten someone" and directs residents to a private service for wildlife removal. Lethal removal "should be considered only in the event of an unprovoked, confirmed attack on a human," and even then it should target the specific coyote involved, not the wider population. High-intensity hazing is reserved for trained professionals such as animal control and police officers, for "more egregious incidents."

That leaves a lot of ground for residents to cover, and the calendar decides when.

The Coyote Year, Laid Over Your Walking Year

The plan divides the coyote year into three seasons.

Mid-November falls in the dispersal season, when young coyotes are on the move and passing through areas they did not grow up in. Breeding season starts in about seven weeks, and that is the season the plan connects to run-ins with bigger dogs. These two seasons run back to back from September to the end of March, which covers the short, dark evenings when most after-work dog walks happen.

The 2024 document, as OKC Friday summarized it, adds one more piece. Coyotes are naturally most active at dawn and dusk, but in cities and suburbs they often shift toward nighttime to avoid people. In winter, a 6 p.m. walk down Grand Boulevard already takes place in the dark.

Six Feet Of Leash

The plan's guidance for dog owners centers on one measurement. It advises keeping dogs on a leash six feet long or shorter outdoors, or within six feet of a person. It says coyotes may see a dog on a longer leash as unattended. For breeding season specifically, it repeats the point: don't leave dogs outside unattended, and keep them on leashes of six feet or less in public areas.

That six-foot line also appears in the model guide the city drew from. The Humane Society's coyote guide sorts conflicts into categories. A pet injured while a person is within six feet is an "attended pet attack," and the model calls for high-intensity hazing by animal control or police in that case. For an off-leash pet hurt in an open space, the model's response is education, removing attractants and signs reminding people to leash their dogs. In the model, the distance between you and your dog helps decide which kind of response follows.

The rest of the pet guidance in the plan is short:

• Don't leave pets outside unattended. The plan calls this the best way to reduce risk to pets.
• Keep cats indoors, in a secure enclosure, or on a leash and harness under someone's control.
• If you feed community cats, feed them in daytime at a set time and pick up leftovers promptly.

The 2024 plan's household list targets what draws coyotes in the first place. Never feed a coyote, don't feed pets outdoors, store pet food indoors, use locking lids on trash cans, clean up fallen fruit, and remove bird feeders or sweep up spilled seed that attracts the small mammals coyotes hunt.

When One Is Standing On The Path

Most of the time a coyote is easier to hear than to see. The plan notes that two or three coyotes can distort their voices to sound like a group of 20. Their tracks usually run in a straight line, unlike a dog's wandering path, and their scat looks rope-like and is often full of hair, seeds and bone.

If one does stand its ground, the plan's basic hazing method is something a resident can do on the spot:

1. Face the coyote.
2. Make yourself look "big and loud" by waving your arms.
3. Make noise by yelling or using a noisemaker, or throw something toward it or squirt water.
4. Keep it up until the coyote leaves.

The plan lists backyards, greenbelts, play spaces and yards as places where hazing can discourage coyotes from settling in. In the Humane Society model, the response to a coyote seen resting somewhere people often go is to teach hazing and remove attractants, so that it learns to move along.

After the encounter, the plan asks residents to report it. It provides a standard Coyote Incident Form that asks for the date, time, your name, address and phone number, and details of what happened. The plan also lists these contacts:

The reports feed the monitoring the plan describes, with residents and city officials tracking activity together. In 2024, Pate described the form the same way: something residents fill out "to help us track and manage their whereabouts."

The Parks Already Run On This Model

Splitting the work this way, with a narrow role for the city and residents doing the daily share, is how Nichols Hills already runs its green space. According to OKC Friday's May 2026 report on the city's park projects, Nichols Hills Parks, Inc. has supported the city's 37 parks since 1983. The city mows and waters the grass. Parks Inc. handles landscaping, sidewalks, playground maintenance and improvements, and each park has a volunteer chairman who raises money for it.

Two of the best evening walks in the city came out of that system this year. Redbud Park, at Grand Boulevard and Sherwood Lane, reopened after a $2.24 million redesign funded with a $500,000 lead gift from Robert and Karen Browne and more than $1.1 million in resident donations. It now has a fountain, a new pond, a pedestrian bridge and dozens of new trees. Westminster Park, in the 1800 block of Westminster Place, is the city's first public park in Ward 3. It was built for $1.4 million in city funds by buying two homes and turning the west end of the block into a cul-de-sac, and it has nature-inspired play equipment, sidewalk trails and a water feature.

Parks Inc. chairman Casey Williams, who chaired Woods Park for 14 years, told OKC Friday she hopes to add a dog park if more land is ever given to the city. Until then, the dog walk in Nichols Hills runs along Grand Boulevard, past the Redbud Park pond, and down Westminster Place. Between now and the end of March, the city's plan asks that it happen with the dog no more than six feet away.

At Kaiser + Drake Realty, we follow the small decisions at Nichols Hills City Hall because they shape how a neighborhood feels day to day, from a new cul-de-sac park to a coyote plan. If you live here and want to know what the city's latest changes mean for your block, Work with Us. We're glad to talk it through.