Once each spring, half an hour before sunrise, Greg Kubica sets out from Rose River Bridge #1 on the South Canol Highway and drives north. Every eight-tenths of a kilometre he stops for three minutes, and then carries on.

It's not, as you might think, an odd spring ritual. It's part of a continent-wide survey of breeding birds.

During his three-minute stops, Kubica looks for birds and listens intently. He notes every bird and every species he sees or hears during the stop, then climbs back in the car to drive another 800 metres.

He starts at 3:48 a.m. and finishes the 50 stops on the route roughly four hours later. The set start time and the strictly-timed observation periods are designed to make the survey as consistent as possible from year to year.

Kubica admits it's not easy to get up that early, even for a bird enthusiast.

"You spend one day a year being super-tired," he says, "but it's fun to get out and spend time in a place you don't normally see often."

Kubica isn't paid for his efforts. The Whitehorse birder is part of the army of volunteers that makes the Breeding Bird Survey and other bird population studies possible.

The information he gathers, along with information from more than a dozen other survey routes in the Yukon, is sent to Environment Canada's National Wildlife Research Centre in Hull, Quebec. Canadian information is then plugged into survey results from the rest of North America to provide a continent-wide picture of the status of bird populations.

Participating in the Breeding Bird Survey isn't a job for beginners. With only three minutes to identify birds at each location, you have to know what to look and listen for.

Particularly in forested locations, the only clue to a bird's presence and identity is its song. There are CDs and tapes available to help birders learn the songs of different species, but Kubica says he remembers the songs best if he sees the bird singing in the wild.

"It's tough. I find it very tough," he says, of identifying birds by song. "You have to have a relatively good idea of the bird songs that you're going to run into on your route. Everything has to be on the tip of your tongue."

After five years, he has a very good idea of what birds he'll find along the South Canol. Most varieties of thrush that nest in the Yukon show up on his route, Kubica says, along with an assortment of warblers, sparrows, and other small forest birds.

In the 1997 survey, the most common species on the route were Swainson's Thrush, Myrtle Warbler, Slate-colored Junco, and Pine Siskin. One year, Kubica spotted a Great Horned Owl on the survey. Another year he identified a Night Hawk.

Before taking on his South Canol survey route, Kubica helped his father, Whitehorse teacher Lee Kubica, on routes elsewhere in the southern Yukon. Together they pioneered a survey route in the Haines Summit area.

The Haines Summit route covers a much wider range of habitat, from coniferous forest up to the alpine, he says. As a result, it includes a much wider range of bird species.

"We actually had a hummingbird down by Rainy Hollow one year," he says.

Part of the pleasure of helping with the Breeding Bird Survey is contributing significantly to the knowledge base about Yukon birds, Kubica says.

"Relatively little is known about birds in the Yukon," he says. "Usually one or two species are added to the Yukon list every year."

And there's always a chance that an as-yet-unrecorded species will decide to nest beside the Rose River along the South Canol Highway.

For more information about the Breeding Bird Survey and other bird studies, contact Environment Canada in Whitehorse.