The Genius Behind @OKWildlifeDept’s Most Viral Tweets Is Signing Off

Sarah Southerland calls herself a “Covid baby.” After graduating from the University of Central Oklahoma, she started working for the NBA. She worked as a podcast producer for the Oklahoma City Thunder. Then, in 2020, Covid-19 shut down the league and she “saw that as an opportunity to go and try something different.” So she applied to be a social media coordinator at the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation.

What happened next is the stuff of internet lore. Southerland got the job and got to work shifting the tone of the department’s Twitter feed. What had been a destination for people looking for information on getting a hunting license became a place where Southerland would dish out advice on bear spray (“does not work like bug spray”), proper water bottle care (“some of you desperately need to wash”), and cougar sighting reports (“Whoever filled out a cougar sighting report and wrote ‘your mother’ under the description drop your @ we just want to talk”).

Southerland also jumped on memes, like the time she got on the “check your kids’ Halloween candy” trend by noting that people should look for invasive species like silver carp. Then there was the time she publicly apologized to T-Pain for turning “Buy U a Drank” into a song sung to a gar, the underappreciated “trash fish” to which the department dedicated a whole week.

She also spent a fair amount of time deflecting people who just wanted to yell at government agencies, even though most of their complaints weren’t about anything in the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation’s control.

Last Friday, Southerland announced that she’d made her final post. It was about not feeding doughnuts to wildlife. “For the past four years, it’s been my job—nay, my PLEASURE—to be the tweeter behind the @OKWildlifeDept account,” she wrote. “It’s been my absolute honor to roast and ratio some of you into the ground in the name of science.”

Before she starts her new job in advertising, Southerland got on Zoom with WIRED to talk about Swifties, the similarities between social media spats and high school debate competitions, and what will happen to virality now that Twitter has become X.

ANGELA WATERCUTTER: Ever since you took over @OKWildlifeDept, it’s become known for its style and attitude. When you started, did you kind of come in saying, “Guys, I wanna do something a little weird … ”?

SARAH SOUTHERLAND: There was an actual sit-down, come-to-Jesus meeting with everybody who had volunteered to be on the social media team, which is just one full-time person, myself, and then everybody else who has a full-time role who just wanted to help participate. We talked about how Twitter was our problem child. You know, in 2020, 2021, being a part of government communications was not fun. People were upset.

Right. Folks were stuck inside and looking for someone to yell at about vaccines and masks.

It was a tough crowd. So we decided to make the move to talk more like ourselves. It took a bit before it was really recognized, but we were given permission to do it, and that was intentional.

What was the feed like before you started? Was it just a lot of wildlife biology and “here’s how you can apply for a fishing license”?

It was good science, and it still is good science. It's stuff that people worked really hard on. It just wasn't formatted in a way that would actually make people click on it. Because Twitter, especially at that time, was a place where people went to be upset and we were just there being like, “What does your habitat look like for quail?”

[Laughs] Yeah, I bet. “Who is hunting this season?”

So a lot did come from that feeling of being like, “This is what we got for y'all. Here you go.” People were super used to, and expected to bully[ing] the government. So when I would log on to our Twitter account, I realized that there was a lot of misunderstanding of what we did. So a lot of that anger was misdirected. I think a part of the sassiness and the clapping back did initially start with like, “We're not tax-funded” or “That's not us.” Just trying not to take a bunch of blows that we didn't have to.

Tell me about the voice of the feed. Is that all you?

I think the sassy replies are me. But like the initial, the first [tweet] comes from a group of everybody else. Sometimes it’s taking an idea from [someone at the organization] and then [running with it]. But once this house [gestures to the home she’s sitting outside of] literally exploded. Like all the pipes in this house exploded. So the sassy replies on that one came from me real-time being, like, “OK, I gotta save the valuables.” I think that’s when people were like, “This is kind of a Ron Swanson, like snarky caricature.” So that’s who we built around. Somebody who starts out friendly and nice, like a park ranger with a little bit of an attitude or a game warden who’s been on shift too long.

The pipes bursting came during one of your earliest viral tweets, from January 2022. It’s the mountain lion with the caption, “YOU are cold. They have fur. Do not let inside.” What was that experience like of, “Oh crap, people are reading these.”?

It was really hard because we were just trying to do better. Then when it exploded, I don't think I was ready just as a professional and as a person to have like that many eyes on what I was doing at a time. I did take it more seriously than it needed to be. It caused a lot of anxiety, a lot of mental health issues.

How did you cope with that?

I realized as I started relaxing and relying on my team a little bit more it got better to start having those breakthrough tweets more often. So like 2022 [onward], I think we went viral with a tweet that got over a million views at least once a month. That was just the norm for us. That mountain lion one, that's the one that is a running joke. People still quote it at that account and at me and it's just like, “I don't think you all realize what was happening; that was not a good day. But I'm happy you enjoyed it.”

Maybe it prepared you for all the Swifites. Last fall the account tweeted, “Someone please get this woman photographed holding a fishing license” alongside a post about Taylor Swift leading to a bump in Travis Kelce jersey sales. In your goodbye thread you said you “sent this and left for the day, and came back to our inbox on fire. No regrets.”

So the Swiftie story arc with that account is funny because we do have a resident Swiftie in the communications [department] who is like the person that I refer to who, like, went to the Eras Tour. When the tickets dropped and people were waiting in line, we took a picture of her screen and it showed that she was, like, 2,000th in line and we [posted] something like, “If a couple thousand of you could go take a hike right now that would be great.” It blew up.

Did she get tickets?!

When she finally went to the tour, we sent her with our sticker to show people that we made it. Then a bunch of people commented, “Government workers deserve better seats.”

I think it added to the personality that in the same breath as we’re making dad jokes we’re also actively trying to go to the Eras Tour.

Totally. I wanted to ask you about the Government Social Media association Golden Post award you won in 2022. How is your work received among your peers?

What we were doing was still kind of new for [our field], but just basic internet for everybody else. So there were people who were like, “Oh my God, I wanna do what you guys do and I wanna be that way.” Then there's people who have been funny forever but hadn't had that kind of moment. Then there were government people, people who were telling me that I'm being disrespectful.

How did you respond to that?

I was just experiencing it like, “This is what I'm doing. I’m not sorry about it, but again, I don't know what to do outside of this. I'm just trying this out.” I was able to make some really, really good friends with that approach. I think once people realized “Oh, she is not being reckless, but she’s also not an expert either.” That grace came through, you know?

Yeah, as an outside observer, it’s clear to me, through your tweets, that you care about wildlife and how people interact with it.

Yeah. I think it took like actually meeting a few people to be like, “Oh, OK.” If that makes sense.

“She gets it.”

I think, you know, social media people get that lizard brain reputation about ’em, and really fighting that was important to me.

I feel like the person who was running the TSA account around that same time would relate to this. They also won a Golden Post that year.

And they used Instagram to do it. Which is really hard. Now you see more memes on Instagram, and they definitely perfected it before it became a norm. But yeah, it’s that same attitude of, like, these people are going to work for their communities every day, and we are getting sassed and yelled at. [Laughs] So yeah, it is fun being a government social media worker and there are awards for it and there's a community behind it. And it is a very strong, tight-knit group of everybody who participated in student council, basically.

Right. Everyone who was on the debate team.

I was literally a state champion debater.

Little did you know it was going to help you talk to people in the replies of a state wildlife conservation agency’s Twitter feed.

For real. And it did. It's like, how do I stay within the boundaries and still get my point across? Like, having that training really does keep you out of trouble for sure.

Seeing what Twitter is now that it’s become X, do you think someone could do what you did four years ago now?

With Twitter, I don't think you're trying to do the same thing. I think you're just trying to reach the same people. I'm pretty sure 10 years from now people will think what we did was cringe. But that is a part of it. There is such a thing as old Twitter and new Twitter and old Instagram and old Facebook and old Tumblr and old Myspace. As we grow with these algorithms and these platforms, how we speak and how we use them does, so like it's ready for the next person to just take off where we're at and just do something new and different with it.

You also run the department’s TikTok. Has that changed over the years. TikTok has become kind of politicized of late.

So the TikTok account is something I'm really proud of. It's something that they gave me permission to start. I did a lot of research and realized that our initial following on our other platforms were all men, which makes sense. It's a hunting and fishing agency.

As a personal TikTok user I saw, Oh, hey, this algorithm rocks. It can really drill down into that niche. Presenting that to a group of biologists, to a group of government people, and showing them that that was the ticket, like, OK, we can purposely target a new audience and probably get there. So our TikTok account blew up and took off and, we've had a lot of fun and even more viral moments over there than what we've had on Twitter. And that TikTok group is like a bit of a cult following too. I think we got to like 460,000 followers, and we started in 2022. And we did find more women, and that is the only account right now that has a majority female following.

It also got you more Parks and Recreation comparisons.

I'm really proud of ’em. But back when we were like “200 likes, woo!” It was me using the green screen filter in a closet. I think in one video I'm explaining how deer shed their antlers, and my phone falls over and I just keep going. When I see that video now I'm like, “Why'd I do that?” But I think that's what people liked, too. It gave the feeling that they could probably work there themselves. Or, like, “Oh, these people are Oklahomans.” We try to keep it that way. We didn't wanna come across like we're influencers.

I read recently that you have a separate phone for the TikTok account.

Our governor [Kevin Stitt] gave an executive order that TikTok was not allowed on any government devices. Because of this cult following, our TikTok account had enough people to go and appeal and ask, “Hey, we really like this wildlife department account, what is that gonna mean for it?” And luckily we were able to work out a plan with our foundation to give me a third cell phone. Its whole job was not to connect to the state internet, not to use email, not to do anything. And that's how our TikTok account ran. That’s how it still runs.

So we have faced legislation and obstacles, but the whole point of it is just to not panic and just take it as it comes, because it's like, Twitter is gonna become X, and then after X it'll be something else. And same thing with TikTok. It may just completely change, but people are still gonna be on those platforms so you just go with them.

Do you know who is going to take over the @OKWildlifeDept accounts?

I don't, the job opens today.

I'm really excited for the people who have expressed interest in that specific job. I think that is a really humbling experience for people to be like, “I wanna do what you do.” I didn't grow up wanting to be like a firefighter or like a politician. I didn't grow up wanting one of those jobs that people want. [Laughs]