Yukon Wildlife Viewing is launching its annual A Celebration of Swans poster competition. This is your chance to enter your art to be featured on the 2026 poster.
A Celebration of Swans is an annual festival held during the month of April at the Swan Haven Interpretive Centre at M’Clintock Bay on Marsh Lake. Every year, The Department of Environment's Wildlife Viewing Program, with support from Yukon Energy, produces a collectible poster featuring an art piece celebrating spring and the arrival of swans. Posters are free and distributed across the Yukon.
We encourage interested Yukon artists, including those early in their career, to submit their original art for consideration. The successful artist receives an honorarium of $500.
Note: If your artwork depicts swans, however abstract/artistic, use Trumpeter Swans or Tundra Swans as your inspiration, which have mostly black bills. The yellow-billed swan popularized in media resembles the Mute Swan, which is not native to North America.
Submit your artwork
1. Send us a high quality image of your art (image file or PDF) and a brief description that includes its medium and size. Do not submit the actual art.
2. A small jury will judge the pieces. The winner will be contacted shortly after the contest closes.
3. Wildlife Viewing will announce the winner and release the poster to the public at the end of March.
4. The artist will receive a $500 honorarium.
You must be a Yukon resident to enter.
Deadline
The deadline to enter is February 13, 2026 at 5 pm Yukon Time.
Submit your entry electronically, in person or by mail.
Email: [email protected]
In person: 10 Burns Road in Whitehorse, Yukon. We are open Monday to Friday from 8:30 am to 4:45 pm.
Mail: Yukon Wildlife Viewing Department of Environment PO Box 2703 (V-5R) Whitehorse, Yukon Y1A 2C6
The winner of the 2025 art contest was Takeshi Hanatani.
About the 2025 winner
Takeshi Hanatani's photograph is featured on this collectible poster designed by Jen Edwards of Sprucetip Design.
Takeshi Hanatani has photographed North American wildlife for almost 30 years. In 2007, he emigrated from Japan to explore the Canadian Rockies. Since 2010, he’s called the Yukon home, where he works diligently to capture the dramatic beauty of local wildlife in their natural habitat. Takeshi aspires to use the medium of photography to create meaning and evoke emotion for the natural world.
About the photo
Every spring, I travel to Swan Haven and Tagish to photograph migrating swans. I was inspired to take this photograph because of the way the slanted sunlight emphasized the swan’s form as well as its footprints on the ice. Swans are one of my favourite subjects – they are beautiful, powerful and poetic.
-Takeshi Hanatani
For questions about the festival poster, email [email protected] or phone: 867-667-8291 or toll free in the Yukon: 1-800-661-0408, ext. 8291.
