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Perched in the highest branches, typically near a waterway, the scarlet raptor pursues prey under the canopy—targeting swift prey like the rainbow lorikeet and snatching them from the air.

The gentle hum of their strong, expansive, metre-wide wings is audible from below as they gain speed, then silently swooping and banking like a feathered fighter jet.

Yet the spectacle of the red goshawk—a bird found nowhere else on Earth—is vanishing from the Australian landscape.

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

“It was still frequently seen in northern New South Wales and south-east Queensland until the 2000s, but since then, the records completely disappear. It has fallen off the map.”

Although the bird being first described in 1801, it was never a common sight and, until modern times, not much was known about the behavior of Australia’s rarest bird of prey. Most birdwatchers have yet to spot it.

Currently, scientists like MacColl are in a race to determine how many of these birds are left so they can improve efforts to save them.

A bird expert, a senior conservationist at BirdLife Australia, devoted time looking for them in south-east Queensland in 2013—returning to locations where they had been observed just 15 years earlier.

“I couldn’t find them anywhere. So we started a recovery team,” he says. “At the time, we didn’t know their home range, what habitats they required, or really what they were up to or where they were traveling.”

The bird certainly existed as far south as Sydney in the past. In the 1700s, a convict artist named Thomas Watling sketched the bird from a sample nailed to the side of a settler’s hut in Botany Bay.

That drawing—now stored in a UK museum—was passed to British ornithologist John Latham, who used it to officially name the red goshawk in 1801.

Closer to Extinction

In 2023, the federal government changed the status of the red goshawk from vulnerable to endangered—labeling it as closer to extinction—and estimated there were just 1,300 mature birds left in the wild. MacColl thinks the actual number could be under a thousand.

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

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

“I worry about climate change and especially the extreme temperatures and overheating dangers for the young birds. Then there’s the ongoing threat of environmental destruction from agriculture, forestry, and resource extraction.”

Satellite tracking has revealed that some juveniles undertake a dangerous 1,500-kilometer flight south to the Australian interior for about most of the year—possibly learning how to hunt—before returning for good to their seaside homes.

Just why the species has experienced such a rapid collapse 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 stands of trees are increasingly rare any more,” he says.

The Red Goshawk ‘Glare’

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

They are not noisy, and Seaton says while most large birds will fly away if a human gets close, alerting anyone looking for them, a red goshawk “will just glare at you.”

There were only 10 known breeding pairs on the Australian mainland this year, Seaton says, with 10 more on the Tiwi archipelago (the largest island in the group, Melville, is now considered the red goshawk’s main habitat).

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 thick sticks on level limbs—to see how successful they are at reproducing and get a clearer picture 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, watching activity at nests over 30-minute periods.

“They’re stunning, but they can be tricky to see because their plumage merge with the trunks of the trees,” he says.

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

Averting Extinction

MacColl was working as an ecology expert for Rio Tinto about a ten years back when he first saw a red goshawk nest in Cape York’s west.

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

Red goshawks are in a genus of bird that has only one other known member—Papua New Guinea’s brown-shouldered raptor.

Their strength amazes him. A red goshawk that goes to the forest floor to grab a stick will fly back to a branch 30 metres up “vertically,” he says. “They go directly upward.”

“There really is nothing like them,” says MacColl. “They’re not directly linked 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 people together—and the best information possible to know what they require. That’s how we save the species.”