If the next year of Malkolm Boothroyd's life was to have a title, 'Of Birds and Bikes' would be a rather fitting one.

That's because on Thursday, 15-year-old Malkolm and his parents, Ken Madsen and Wendy Boothroyd, will depart on a 16,000-kilometre, year-long bicycle trip to raise awareness about climate change and the impact it will have on the birds of North America.

Although the entire family is participating, Madsen gives Malkolm the credit for being the driving force behind the 'Bird Year' project.

Malkolm was originally inspired by a book on the Big Year, an informal competition among North American birders to see who can spot the largest number of species of birds within a single calendar year.

The record was set in 1998 by Sandy Kimoto, who listed 745 species of birds, a record which many in the birding community believe will never be broken.

'It's a great challenge, to be committing that much of your future to a task like that, but people were jetting cross-continent to do it and using an extraordinary amount of fossil fuels,' Malkolm said.

He added that the distance travelled in 1998 was more than 260,000 miles, a greater distance than from the Earth to the moon.

While the trio won't be travelling anywhere near 260,000 miles during their Big Year, they are taking a stance against the use of fossil fuels, and will travel almost the entire route by bicycle.

'We're trying to be as pure as we can about not using extra fossil fuels,' Madsen said. Some of their friends will be travelling ahead along a similar travel route dropping off some supplies, but for the most part they plan to be self-sufficient.

Since they are travelling with a fair amount of gear, they aren't planning to cover huge amounts of distance on a daily basis. They hope to do somewhere between 50 and 60 kilometres a day, but their schedule is fairly flexible.

The trip will start tomorrow with a drive to Watson Lake, where they will jump on their bikes and ride to Dease Lake, B.C. Malkolm has arranged to write one of his school exams in Dease Lake to get a head start on their trip.

From there, they will travel along the Stewart-Cassiar Highway, then down through Prince George and Squamish. Their trip will take them along the west coast of Washington, Oregon, and down into California.

Their travel itinerary has been planned around a couple of key bird hot spots, the first of which is Monterey Bay, just south of San Francisco.

'In my head, I knew where I wanted to be at which times of the year, where the best places are,' Malkolm said. 'Ken and Wendy have scheduled the trip around that.'

Many species of seabirds stop at Monterey Bay in September. After the family spends some time there, they will continue on to Arizona, New Mexico,and Texas, and will spend New Year's on the Gulf Coast.

The next stops on the trip will be Mississippi and Louisiana, where they will be giving several presentations and meeting with an expert on Mississippi birds. They will spend some time in the bayous following up on a rumour of sightings of the Ivory Billed Woodpecker, which is believed to be extinct.

They will then backtrack to Texas so they can be at High Island in April, which is the second hot spot of the trip and what Malkolm believes will be the highlight of the year. High Island is a green peninsula in the middle of an industrial area where many species of songbirds stop.

The Houston Audobon Society operates four bird sanctuaries in the area.

'It's basically the first large patch of green the birds see after a long trip, and they're so exhausted that they pretty much just collapse into it,' Malkolm said.

After High Island, the family will travel east again to Florida, then sail to the Dry Tortugas, a small group of islands just west of the Florida Keys.

The trip will end June 21, 2008, exactly a year after it started.

To participate in Bird Year, Malkolm condensed three years' worth of school into two years, dropping his electives to take on the added academic courses, as well as completing courses at home after school hours.

Big Year events such as this are not very common. Madsen called it the ultramarathon of birding.

'It can literally engulf your life,' he said. 'It's admittedly a pretty bizarre thing to do.

'As much as our goal is to raise public awareness, the only person you can really change is yourself. Hopefully, other people become inspired by what we're doing as well, and I think that seeing a young person who's so keen on this whole thing is very inspiring.'

They hope to raise $100,000 which would go toward bird conservation projects from the Arctic to Central America, and even though they have yet to embark on their trip, the donations have already begun to trickle in.

Malkolm said climate change can deal a large blow to birds that live in the Arctic, moreso than in other regions.

'Many people will hop in their cars and drive hundreds of miles to go see a single bird,' Madsen said. 'We're not saying, Don't go searching for birds'; it's more about using alternative methods to do that. People have to look at these things in their lives, one way or another.'

Several well-known people in birding circles have already come forward and given their support to the trip, or volunteered to help in some capacity.

Birding icon David Allen Sibley, author of the Sibley Field Guide to Birds, has been in touch with Malkolm, along with several other experts.

'It's amazing how much they know,' Malkolm said. 'The amount of knowledge some of these people have is very useful for helping us plan our route.'

Malkolm will also be writing a series of articles for the Journal of American Birding Association to help convey its conservation message.

Of the three, Madsen is the only one who has been involved in a major bicycle trip. Philippe LeBlond from Philippe's Bicycle Repair has helped the family by putting new components onto basic steel-frame bikes and giving bike maintenance lessons.

'They're all fairly simple bikes, and they pretty much have the same components so we can bring the fewest amount of tools,' Malkolm said.

They will also have a laptop and camera along for the trip so they can update their website and blog, www.birdyear.com

Once they finish the Stewart-Cassiar Highway, they hope to make frequent updates on their website, where donations can also be made.