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Perched in the tallest tree, typically near a waterway, the scarlet raptor pursues prey under the canopy—chasing down speed demons like the colorful parrot and snatching them from the air.

The soft thrum of their deep, powerful, wide-spanning wings can be heard from below as they accelerate, then quietly diving and banking like a avian aircraft.

Yet the sight of the red goshawk—a species found nowhere else on Earth—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 BirdLife Australia.

“It was still frequently seen in northern New South Wales and south-east Queensland until the 2000s, but after that, the records have dropped off. It has vanished from known areas.”

Despite the bird being first described in 1801, it was rarely seen and, until modern times, relatively little was known about the habits of Australia’s rarest bird of prey. Most birdwatchers have never seen one.

Currently, researchers like MacColl are in a race to determine how many of these birds remain so they can improve conservation plans.

A bird expert, the director of terrestrial birds at BirdLife Australia, spent months looking for them in southeast QLD in 2013—revisiting sites where they had been recorded just 15 years earlier.

“I couldn’t find them anywhere. So we formed a conservation group,” he notes. “At the time, we were unaware of their home range, what environments they needed, or really what they were doing or where they were traveling.”

The bird certainly existed 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 nailed to the side of a pioneer’s home in Botany Bay.

That drawing—now housed in a UK museum—found its way to British ornithologist John Latham, who used it to formally describe the red goshawk in 1801.

Closer to Extinction

In 2023, the federal government 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 adults left in the wild. MacColl thinks the true count could be under a thousand.

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

“While that region is mostly intact, it has its own issues,” says MacColl, who has been researching the bird for almost a decade.

“I worry about global warming and particularly the extreme temperatures and overheating dangers for the young birds. Then there’s the continuing risk of habitat loss from farming, forestry, and resource extraction.”

Satellite tracking has shown that some young birds undertake a risky 1,500km flight south to the Australian interior for about most of the year—possibly honing their skills—before coming back for good to their seaside homes.

The reason the species has suffered such a swift decline in its range isn’t certain, but Seaton says broken-up environments is likely to blame.

“They seek out the tallest tree in the tallest stand, and those stands of trees are increasingly rare any more,” he explains.

The Red Goshawk ‘Stare’

Red goshawks can be difficult to see and have vast territories—possibly as big as 600 square kilometers—and would historically have always been sparsely distributed around the landscape, while staying close to shorelines and rivers.

They are quiet birds, and Seaton says while most large birds will flee if a human approaches, signaling anyone searching for them, a red goshawk “will just glare at you.”

There were only ten recorded pairs on the continent this year, Seaton reports, with 10 more on the Tiwi archipelago (the largest island in the group, Melville, is now considered the red goshawk’s stronghold).

BirdLife Australia has been educating Indigenous rangers and native custodians in the north to identify the birds and monitor activity in their metre-wide nests—constructed out of thick sticks on level limbs—to see how effective they are at reproducing and get a clearer picture on the actual numbers of red goshawks.

Tiwi islander Chris Brogan is a firefighter for a forestry company on Melville Island and is part of a team that checks on the birds, watching activity at nests over half-hour intervals.

“They’re beautiful, but they can be tricky to see because their colors blend in with the tree bark,” he comments.

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

Preventing Disappearance

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

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

Red goshawks are in a genus of bird that has only a single relative—Papua New Guinea’s brown-shouldered raptor.

Their strength impresses him. A red goshawk that heads to the ground to collect a stick will return to a branch 30 metres up “straight up,” he says. “They go straight up.”

“There really 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 collaboration of experts together—and the most accurate data possible to know what they require. That’s how we avert extinction.”