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Perched in the tallest tree, often near a waterway, the scarlet raptor hunts beneath the canopy—targeting swift prey like the rainbow lorikeet and plucking them from the air.

The gentle hum of their deep, powerful, metre-wide wings can be heard from below as they gain speed, before silently swooping and banking like a feathered fighter jet.

Yet the spectacle of the red goshawk—a species found only in Australia—is disappearing from the Australian landscape.

“It’s gone extinct throughout eastern Australia, unnoticed by many,” explains a researcher from the University of Queensland and a bird conservation group.

“It was still frequently seen in northern NSW and south-east Queensland up to the 2000s, but since then, the records completely disappear. It has vanished from known areas.”

Despite the bird being first described in 1801, it was rarely seen and, until recently, not much was known about the habits of Australia’s most uncommon raptor. Most birdwatchers have never seen one.

Now, scientists like MacColl are working urgently to determine how many of these birds are left so they can improve conservation plans.

A bird expert, a senior conservationist at a leading bird organization, spent months searching for them in south-east Queensland in 2013—revisiting sites where they had been observed just a decade and a half before.

“I couldn’t find them anywhere. So we started a recovery team,” he notes. “At the time, we were unaware of their territory, what environments they required, or really what they were doing or where they were traveling.”

The species was present as far south as Sydney in the past. In the late 18th century, a convict artist named Thomas Watling sketched the bird from a sample attached to the side of a settler’s hut in Botany Bay.

That illustration—now stored in a UK museum—was passed to English bird expert John Latham, who used it to formally describe the red goshawk in 1801.

Nearer to Vanishing

In 2023, the national authorities changed the classification of the red goshawk from at risk to critically threatened—assessing it as nearer to dying out—and calculated there were just 1,300 mature birds left in the wild. MacColl thinks the actual number could be below 1,000.

The bird’s breeding areas are now limited to the northern grasslands of the north, from the Kimberley region in the west to Cape York Peninsula on Queensland’s top end.

“While that area is mostly intact, it has its own problems,” says MacColl, who has been researching the bird for seven years.

“I am concerned about climate change and especially the immense heat and overheating dangers for the juveniles. Then there’s the continuing risk of environmental destruction from agriculture, forestry, and mining.”

GPS monitoring has shown that some young birds undertake a dangerous 1,500-kilometer flight south to the Australian interior for about most of the year—perhaps honing their skills—before coming back for good to their coastal boltholes.

The reason the species has suffered such a swift decline in its range isn’t certain, but Seaton says fragmentation of habitat is likely to blame.

“They look for the tallest tree in the tallest stand, and those wooded areas are increasingly rare any more,” he says.

The Red Goshawk ‘Glare’

Red goshawks can be difficult to see and have huge home ranges—possibly as big as 600 sq km—and would traditionally have always been thinly spread around the landscape, while staying close to shorelines and rivers.

They are not noisy, and Seaton says while many raptors will flee if a human approaches, signaling anyone searching for them, a red goshawk “will just glare at you.”

There were only 10 known breeding pairs on the Australian mainland this year, Seaton reports, with 10 more on the Tiwi Islands (the largest island in the group, Melville, is now regarded as the red goshawk’s stronghold).

A conservation group has been educating local guardians and traditional owners in the north to spot the birds and monitor activity in their wide nests—built out of sturdy branches on horizontal branches—to see how successful they are at breeding and get a better handle on the true population of red goshawks.

Tiwi islander Chris Brogan is a firefighter for Plantation Management Partners on Melville Island and is part of a team that monitors the birds, observing activity at nests over half-hour intervals.

“They’re beautiful, but they can be tricky to see because their plumage blend in with the trunks of the trees,” he comments.

“When I started, I assumed they were just another bird. I thought they were everywhere. But it’s a bird that’s vanishing.”

Averting Extinction

MacColl was working as an environmental scientist for a mining firm about a decade ago when he initially spotted a red goshawk nest in Cape York’s west.

“I have been totally obsessed ever since,” he says.

Red goshawks are in a category of bird that has only one other known member—PNG’s chestnut-shouldered goshawk.

Their power impresses him. A red goshawk that heads to the forest floor to collect a stick will return to a perch 30 metres up “straight up,” he says. “They go directly upward.”

“There truly is no other bird like it,” says MacColl. “They’re not closely related to any other bird of prey in Australia—they’re on their unique limb of the evolutionary tree.

“We are going to need a network of experts together—and the most accurate data possible to know what they need. That’s how we save the species.”