Listen to the audio story to hear how Maxfield Weakley became interested in birds and why he still cares.
Maxfield Weakley has taken tens of thousands of bird photos over the years. The 29-year-old Ocala native, who now lives in Ocklawaha, worked as a private birding guide around central Florida before launching MaxBirdFacts.com in 2020. He became president of the Marion Audubon Society, which has more than 160 members, earlier this year.
The society’s October Big Day event on Saturday will coincide with a worldwide effort to document in 24 hours as many bird species as possible during their fall migrations. The group will birdwatch from sunrise to sunset, working north across Marion County from Halpata Tastanaki Nature Preserve to Marjorie A. Hoy Memorial Park at Orange Lake Overlook.
Weakley recently told WUFT News that his organization now holds events each Saturday and that he hopes for more in-person meetings to begin in January. “A big thing that I have noticed recently is more people are starting to ask how they can help us,” he said.
This Q&A has been edited for clarity.
Q: How has your first year as president been?
A: We’ve done a lot this year. We’re doing more with the Ocala Wetlands Recharge Park and the Fort King National Historic Landmark, doing different birding walks with them, doing some outreach and presentations as well. It’s a nice thing to get back with Ocala and get to areas that people might not see as birding locations.
Q: Why did you start MaxBirdFacts.com?
A: A lot of the blogs and other sites that I have seen are fairly superficial. You could search for information on a loggerhead shrike or the Florida scrub jay and get decent information. It’s all serviceable. But my curiosity and what I wanted to learn wasn’t really there. So I decided to take what I knew from about birding, what I have learned from my classes, and what I have read and compile all of that in one place. I think anything that you do, you should try to provide a service.
Q: What’s the rarest bird you have photographed?
A: I think that might be the bare-necked umbrellabird. It was in Costa Rica in 2024, and it was banded. Different colleges or government organizations will sponsor bird banding so they can monitor and track where particular birds go. It’s really unusual to see a banded bird in the wild and photograph that band. I was trying to find where to report it, to tell whoever the researcher is, “I saw your bird at this location at this time.” So one of the things that I have worked on for my site is compiling as many places to report banded birds as I can.
Q: How do you find rare birds closer to home?
A: I have a theory that some of these really heavy downpours knock birds out of the sky, and that tends to be when we have had fairly rare sightings in our area. Indeed, about a month ago, we had a huge thunderstorm. Another birder had spotted a couple of rare warblers at Orange Creek, so I ran up there to try and get those warblers and ended up finding a black-billed cuckoo. It’s the fourth time that bird has been seen in the county. So, super rare bird for us to get.
Q: Why is north central Florida such an important place for birds?
A: Florida in general is essentially a staging ground for either incoming or outgoing birds. You can have some species that were breeding in Nova Scotia moving their way down the Atlantic coast, and now in Florida, having their last little bit of food before shooting the whole distance of the Gulf to the Yucatán Peninsula, usually overnight. It’s this last point where they can refuel before they make this huge exertion.
Q: Interesting. Historically, Florida was kind of split between forests in the northern portion and prairie grassland in the central and southern portion, right?
A: That’s correct. Where we sit, we’re almost on the border between those two zones. In the Ocala National Forest, we have pine flatwoods, longleaf pine forest, sandhill and oak scrub. These very old, established areas are essentially safe havens for a lot of these birds as they move through. We have a lot of natural springs, too, which provide tons of water to all of these zones.
Q: What are you hoping for on October Big Day?
A: The main thing is to try and see as much as you can. The trick is to prioritize different areas, because you have only got certain hours of daylight. In May (the other global “Big Day”), we primarily focused on the north portion of the county, and we ended up doing significantly better than I expected. This time, it’s a very different route, kind of an experiment, essentially a south-to-north trek up the county to see what we can get.
Q: What do people in our area misunderstand about the birds they see every day?
A: I think it’s an expectation that it’s just the same birds all the time. Take a cardinal. Simple red bird, you see it all the time. Good bird, nothing wrong with it, but very common for us. If you see a flash of red shoot between two trees, your immediate thought is going be “just a cardinal.” But if you look at it closer, it might be a summer tanager or a scarlet tanager or something even more rare. If you take the time to look and actually pay attention to what’s around you, you will know that it’s not. If it is the normal bird, then it’s just a normal bird. There’s nothing wrong with that. But you might have missed out on something incredible.