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Nesting in the highest branches, often near a creek, the scarlet raptor pursues prey under the canopy—targeting swift prey like the colorful parrot and plucking them mid-flight.

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

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

“It’s gone extinct all across eastern Australia, right under our noses,” states a researcher from the University of Queensland and BirdLife Australia.

“It was regularly spotted in northern New South Wales and southeast QLD up to the 2000s, but since then, the records have dropped off. It has fallen off the map.”

Despite the bird being initially documented in 1801, it was never a common sight and, until recently, relatively little was known about the habits of Australia’s most uncommon raptor. Most birdwatchers have yet to spot it.

Currently, scientists like MacColl are working urgently to determine how many of these birds remain so they can improve efforts to save them.

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

“I didn’t spot any anywhere. So we started a conservation group,” he says. “At the time, we didn’t know their territory, what environments they required, or truly what they were doing or where they were going.”

The bird certainly existed as far south as Sydney in the past. In the 1700s, a imprisoned painter named Thomas Watling sketched the bird from a specimen nailed to the side of a pioneer’s home in Botany Bay.

That illustration—now housed in a UK museum—found its way to English bird expert John Latham, who used it to officially name the red goshawk in 1801.

Closer to Extinction

In 2023, the national authorities updated the classification of the red goshawk from at risk to critically threatened—assessing it as closer to extinction—and calculated there were just about 1,300 mature birds left in the wild. MacColl thinks the true count could be under a thousand.

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

“While that area is largely undisturbed, it has its own issues,” says MacColl, who has been studying the bird for seven years.

“I worry about global warming and especially the extreme temperatures and overheating dangers for the juveniles. Then there’s the ongoing threat of environmental destruction from farming, forestry, and resource extraction.”

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

The reason the species has experienced such a rapid collapse in its territory isn’t clear, but Seaton says broken-up environments is probably the cause.

“They look for the tallest tree in the largest grove, and those wooded areas aren’t that common any more,” he explains.

The Red Goshawk ‘Glare’

Red goshawks can be hard to spot and have huge home ranges—possibly as big as 600 sq km—and would traditionally have always been sparsely distributed around the landscape, while staying close to coastal areas and rivers.

They are quiet birds, and Seaton says while most large birds will fly away 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 continent this year, Seaton reports, with another ten on the Tiwi archipelago (the biggest landmass in the group, Melville, is now regarded as the red goshawk’s main habitat).

A conservation group has been training Indigenous rangers and native custodians in the north to identify the birds and monitor activity in their wide nests—built out of thick sticks on level limbs—to see how successful they are at breeding and get a better handle on the true population of red goshawks.

Local resident Chris Brogan is a fire management worker for Plantation Management Partners on Melville Island and is part of a team that checks on the birds, observing activity at nests over 30-minute periods.

“They’re stunning, but they can be hard to spot because their plumage merge with the tree bark,” he says.

“When I began, I thought they were just common. I thought they were widespread. But it’s a bird that’s disappearing.”

Preventing Disappearance

MacColl was working as an ecology expert for Rio Tinto about a ten years back when he initially spotted a red goshawk nest in western Cape York.

“I have been completely captivated ever since,” he admits.

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

Their strength impresses him. A red goshawk that heads to the forest floor to collect a stick will fly back to a branch high above “straight up,” he says. “They go directly upward.”

“There really is nothing like them,” says MacColl. “They’re not directly linked to any other raptor in Australia—they’re on their own branch of the family tree.

“We are going to need a collaboration of experts together—and the best information possible to know what they require. That’s how we save the species.”