III.
We've arrived at the most recognizable stop in Alveus, where we find an emu sprinting back-and-forth across his forest-like enclosure.
Maya informs me that emus have a top speed of thirty-one miles per hour, though she finds the current energy level of hers, Stompy, peculiar. “Stomp, wow…he really has places to be today,” she jokes. 

The emu was the sanctuary’s first animal resident. Maya rescued Stompy from a zoo in California when he was just two weeks old; she thought he’d be a perfect ambassador to teach viewers about the exotic meat trade. “Emu meat had a really crazy spike in popularity in the nineties, then people lost interest,” she says. “But emu meat, oil, and leather are all things that people farm emus for, so those are the things we talk about with him.” 

She mentions similar talking points in each animal enclosure. In the chicken coop, Maya describes a game she usually plays with visitors (mostly streamers), where they consider photos of four unique egg-laying operations and guess whether they’re factory farms or cage-free. In the marmoset enclosure, we meet Appa and Momo; Maya explains how her staff rehabbed the monkeys after rescuing them from an overmatched owner, teaching viewers about the exotic pet trade in turn (“Momo's had more than half of his teeth removed because he was fed the wrong thing, [and] his teeth just started rotting out,” she tells me). 

As we walk from enclosure to enclosure, I feel as if I’m watching one of Maya’s streams. It’s been six years now since she began honing her unique form of science communication for the Twitch generation. While she didn’t coin the phrase “hiding the broccoli” herself, she likes to think it’s become her secret sauce, sprinkling conservation facts in between pickup basketball streams, makeup GRWMs, and Let’s Plays. 

“We have a relatively young demographic for conservation educators—we're looking at nineteen to maybe late twenties, early thirties,” she tells me. “These are people that are already online, and they're not used to consuming really dense educational material, right? They're online to be entertained, or to watch, like, gaming content.” 

“And so we have to adjust to those attention spans and give them stuff that's really engaging, without them knowing they’re being taught,” Maya continues. “Because at the end of the day, they're all budding consumers, and they're budding voters. They're people that are developing their own personal philosophies about consumption, and those are all really important things for the future of our planet.” 

Along with featuring animals in her streams, Maya began reaching out to scientists and researchers in 2019, inviting them onto her podcast, Conservation Cast. One of those experts: Dr. Solomon David, a leading aquatic ecologist whose work centers on freshwater fish. 

“I said, ‘Well, what’s this interview like?’” Solomon tells me over a video call. “And she’s like, ‘We do it on Discord.’ I’m like, ‘What’s Discord?’”

The show was not only a podium for experts to share their work live, but also a fundraiser. Solomon remembers Maya matched his enthusiasm for gar, displaying a “genuine interest” in the ancient freshwater fish species he researches. On top of that, every time a member of the Discord chat left a tip, Maya verbally thanked them, calling each subscriber out by name. 

Solomon found this level of community engagement fascinating. “We raised over one thousand dollars for [the nature magazine] Ranger Rick, just from me talking about gar for forty-five minutes,” he recalls. 

Though she stopped publishing Conservation Cast in 2021, across the show’s sixty-plus episodes, Maya says viewers donated over ninety three thousand dollars to various conservation organizations. This success set the stage for her biggest venture yet: Alveus, named after the Latin phrase that means “the channel or bed of a river.” 

“It’s gonna take a lot to make this happen,” Maya shared in her announcement video on February 10, 2021. She set a goal of raising over five hundred thousand dollars, money that would go directly into “building out the facility.” The next day, she streamed for twenty-one hours, incentivizing viewers with prizes like a golden shovel and Gucci loafers worn by the rapper T-Pain. 

It worked. To celebrate, Maya fulfilled a promise she’d made to fans, shaving her head on stream. 

Now, at just twenty-two and armed with cash, she had to figure out how to make the thing a reality. 

“I had little-to-no managerial experience, and definitely no experience in founding a nonprofit,” Maya tells me. She leaned on the experts she’d interviewed on Conservation Cast, including the aforementioned Solomon David and Joe Siegrist (himself an avian researcher and the president of The Purple Martin Conservation Association, a nonprofit dedicated to ensuring the survival of purple martin songbirds). 

“She started bouncing documents back-and-forth to me with, you know, early bylaws and business cases,” Joe tells me. “I was totally a cheerleader from day one because I loved this idea of doing a sanctuary entirely in the virtual space. I wanted to be on the board, and I wanted to do anything I could to make this thing possible.” 

Past just breaking ground on the campus, Maya knew she needed to build a team. One science communicator that’d caught Maya’s eye was the aforementioned Connor O’Brien, then a digital marketing specialist at the American Eagle Foundation (AEF) in Tennessee. In his role, Connor learned less about marketing good jeans and more about capturing footage of bald eagles, installing “eagle cams” in remote areas. 

He’d also started a TikTok account and Twitch channel for the foundation, quietly growing the AEF a cult following. “I was trying to take an organization that was more traditional and get them more new-age,” Connor tells me. “Once Maya got my number, she abused it. She was always calling me for advice.” 

“I was trying to push my organization to do more, and at the same time I was getting a lot of resistance, Maya was pushing full-steam ahead,” he continues. “I watched every minute of her initial campaign and thought, wow, there’s so much power for good here, and she is so committed that she even shaved her head. I think she’d be a good boss.”

Connor joined Joe on the board. That lasted for a month or two, before Maya successfully pitched Connor and his wife, Kayla, on moving to Austin in October 2021. Both hold degrees in biology; they agreed to work at the sanctuary full-time, bringing their experience with them. 

“At the time, there were only the donkeys, Stompy, the crows, the chickens, and chinchillas,” Kayla recalls. These days, she oversees the sanctuary’s forty-plus ambassadors as Director of Animal Care & Training; Connor does a little bit of everything as Director of Operations. 

“When I talked with Connor about it, I said, ‘Two years! I’ll do it for two years!’” Kayla jokes. “It was really just a leap of faith. When you have an opportunity like this, with something that’s being built from the ground up, it’s really cool to be a part of it.” 

The Alveus staff has grown to fifteen members, ranging from animal care coordinators and facility specialists to creative producers and video editors. At first, Maya found it overwhelming to hire folks older than her, many of whom held more expertise and weren’t from Austin. But four years in, they’re proud of the forty-hour work weeks and livable wages they say they can afford to offer employees, particularly in a traditionally low-paying profession. Additionally, Maya feels like they’ve developed a true team culture, centered around a shared love: the animals. 

"We're all really aligned philosophically… we care about conservation, and we want to see this organization help our natural world,” she says. “And so it's really easy when you're all headed to the same place.” 

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