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Nesting in the tallest tree, often near a creek, the scarlet raptor pursues prey under the canopy—targeting speed demons like the colorful parrot and plucking them mid-flight.

The gentle hum of their strong, expansive, metre-wide wings is audible from below as they gain speed, before quietly diving and turning like a feathered fighter jet.

Yet the sight of the red goshawk—a bird found only in Australia—is vanishing from the continent’s terrain.

“It’s vanished all across eastern Australia, unnoticed by many,” explains Chris MacColl from the University of Queensland and a bird conservation group.

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

Despite the bird being first described in 1801, it was rarely seen and, until recently, relatively little was known about the habits of Australia’s most uncommon raptor. Many enthusiasts have never seen one.

Currently, researchers like MacColl are working urgently to understand how many of these birds are left so they can refine conservation plans.

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

“I couldn’t find them anywhere. So we formed a recovery team,” he says. “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 bird certainly existed as far south as Sydney in the past. In the 1700s, 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 illustration—now stored in a UK museum—found its way to English bird expert John Latham, who used it to formally describe the red goshawk in 1801.

Closer to Extinction

In 2023, the national authorities changed the status of the red goshawk from vulnerable to endangered—assessing it as nearer to dying out—and calculated there were just 1,300 adults left in the wild. MacColl believes the true count could be below 1,000.

The bird’s nesting sites are now restricted to the tropical savannas of the north, from the Kimberley region 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 thermal threat risk for the juveniles. Then there’s the ongoing threat of environmental destruction from agriculture, forestry, and mining.”

GPS monitoring has shown that some juveniles take a dangerous 1,500km flight south to central Australia for about most of the year—possibly learning how to hunt—before returning for good to their coastal boltholes.

Just why the species has suffered such a rapid collapse in its territory isn’t certain, but Seaton says fragmentation of habitat is likely to blame.

“They look for the tallest tree in the largest grove, and those stands of trees aren’t that common any more,” he says.

The Red Goshawk ‘Stare’

Red goshawks can be hard to spot and have vast territories—perhaps as big as 600 square kilometers—and would historically have always been thinly spread around the landscape, while staying close to coastal areas and rivers.

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

There were only ten recorded pairs on the Australian mainland this year, Seaton says, with another ten on the Tiwi archipelago (the largest island in the group, Melville, is now regarded as the red goshawk’s main habitat).

A conservation group has been educating Indigenous rangers and native custodians 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 clearer picture on the actual numbers of red goshawks.

Tiwi islander Chris Brogan is a fire management worker for a forestry company 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 tricky to see because their colors merge with the trunks of the trees,” he comments.

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

Preventing Disappearance

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

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

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

Their power impresses him. A red goshawk that goes to the forest floor to grab a stick will return to a branch 30 metres up “straight up,” he says. “They go straight up.”

“There really is nothing like them,” says MacColl. “They’re not closely related to any other bird of prey in Australia—they’re on their unique limb of the family 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 avert extinction.”