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, eve.