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Perched in the highest branches, often near a waterway, the scarlet raptor hunts beneath the canopy—chasing down swift prey like the rainbow lorikeet and plucking them from the air.

The gentle hum of their strong, expansive, 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 species found only in Australia—is disappearing from the Australian landscape.

“It’s gone extinct all across eastern Australia, unnoticed by many,” states a researcher from the University of Queensland and BirdLife Australia.

“It was still frequently seen in northern NSW and southeast QLD up to the 2000s, but since then, the records have dropped off. It has vanished from known areas.”

Although 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. Many enthusiasts have yet to spot it.

Currently, researchers like MacColl are working urgently to understand how many of these birds remain so they can refine efforts to save them.

A bird expert, a senior conservationist at a leading bird organization, devoted time looking for them in southeast QLD in 2013—returning to locations where they had been recorded just a decade and a half before.

“I didn’t spot any anywhere. So we started a recovery team,” he notes. “At the time, we were unaware of their territory, 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 late 18th century, a convict artist named Thomas Watling drew the bird from a sample attached to the side of a pioneer’s home in Botany Bay.

That drawing—now housed 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 updated the classification of the red goshawk from vulnerable to endangered—assessing it as nearer to dying out—and estimated there were just 1,300 mature birds left in the wild. MacColl believes the actual number could be under a thousand.

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

“While that region is largely undisturbed, it has its own problems,” says MacColl, who has been researching the bird for seven years.

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

Satellite tracking has revealed that some young birds undertake a dangerous 1,500-kilometer flight south to central Australia for about eight months—perhaps learning how to hunt—before returning for good to their seaside homes.

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

“They seek out the highest perch in the largest grove, and those wooded areas aren’t that common any more,” he says.

The Red Goshawk ‘Glare’

Red goshawks can be difficult to see and have vast territories—perhaps 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 fly away if a human approaches, signaling anyone looking for them, a red goshawk “will just glare at you.”

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

A conservation group has been training local guardians and traditional owners in the north to spot the birds and observe behavior in their wide nests—built out of thick sticks on horizontal branches—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 firefighter for Plantation Management Partners on Melville Island and is part of a team that checks on the birds, observing activity at nests over half-hour intervals.

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

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

Averting Extinction

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

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

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

Their power impresses him. A red goshawk that goes to the ground to collect a stick will return to a branch high above “vertically,” he says. “They go straight up.”

“There truly is nothing like them,” says MacColl. “They’re not directly linked to any other raptor in Australia—they’re on their unique limb of the evolutionary tree.

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