Every day for almost two months, Jukka Jantunen has been scanning the skies above Whitehorse for hours on end. He arrives at his post on a knoll north of the Whitehorse General Hospital around sunrise so that he can catch the first daily wave of birds migrating up the river valley.

"It seems like there is a morning rush from seven to ten with the swans, though some days it might shut down after about an hour. Around nine, the hawks start to move," he says.

Jantunen is conducting what is called visible migration monitoring. While common in his native Finland and other parts of Europe, this practice is not used as often in North America, and this is the first project of its sort to take place in the Yukon.

"In Europe it is quite different. There is lots of migration watching. In Finland for example, I don't know of any birders who don't do migration monitoring. Many people do it quite a lot."

In Europe migration watching is used commonly to estimate populations and the population status of many different types of birds. In North America the migration monitoring that does take place is focussed mainly on raptors.

The Canadian Wildlife Service (CWS) and Ducks Unlimited are funding Jantunen's work. Jim Hawkings with the CWS says that the information on swans will be particularly useful as the regular counts made at Swan Haven present only a snapshot of that particular area.

"We know how many swans are there each day, but there are always some leaving and others arriving. The result is that we really don't know how many individuals pass through this area and use places like Swan Haven or Tagish River each year. This migration watch will tell us that," he says.

While most songbirds and many ducks migrate at night, swans and raptors tend to migrate during the day. Jantunen first got the idea for this project last spring when he saw golden eagles migrating through the area, and learned that very little was known about their spring migration.

Jantunen picked this particular spot as his monitoring lookout because the birds flying by it are most likely on their way north once again, not just resting in the area. Also the hills and ridges on either side are relatively low, so he is looking up at the birds, making them easier to see.

"It is much easier to spot the birds against the sky," he says.

Both the species and the numbers of birds are noted, as well as the numbers in individual flocks. With his powerful spotting scope, he can see large birds like swans as far as 20 kilometres away.

"If you have a good spot with large numbers of birds moving through, then you know that you have a fair picture of the population going through the area. If you do the same thing year after year, then you can catch the trends and whether the population is increasing or decreasing."

He does not find it difficult to concentrate on the skies for such long periods of time, though the slow periods can sometimes drag on. "If there's not a single bird for an hour or so, it can kind of get on your nerves."

Birds have been migrating through the river valley since late February, when Jantunen first started making occasional trips to the knoll. His best day for golden eagles was back in March when he saw 30 in a day. He has counted 400-500 geese in one day, and similar numbers for swans.

"The best swan day could be today. It could be in the 500 range," he says.

Jantunen scans the skies here until sometime in the afternoon, and then heads out to Swan Haven where he spends more time counting birds and helping out at the interpretive centre. Sometimes he will return to the knoll later in the evening.

He expects to keep up his watch until at least mid-May. By then, with the sun rising even earlier in the morning, he will have to try and catch up on sleep during the middle of the day when there fewer birds in the air.

"Waking up in the morning is the hardest part."

For more information on the migration-monitoring project, contact the Canadian Wildlife Service at 667-3927.