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

The gentle hum of their strong, expansive, wide-spanning wings is audible from below as they accelerate, then silently swooping and banking like a avian aircraft.

Yet the spectacle of the red goshawk—a bird 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 Queensland University and a bird conservation group.

“It was regularly spotted in northern NSW and south-east Queensland up to the 2000s, but since then, the sightings completely disappear. It has fallen off the map.”

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

Currently, researchers like MacColl are in a race 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, spent months looking for them in southeast QLD in 2013—revisiting sites where they had been recorded just 15 years earlier.

“I didn’t spot any anywhere. So we started a conservation group,” he notes. “At the time, we were unaware of their home range, what environments they needed, or really what they were up to or where they were traveling.”

The species 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 specimen attached to the side of a pioneer’s home in Botany Bay.

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

Nearer to Vanishing

In 2023, the national authorities changed the status of the red goshawk from at risk to endangered—assessing it as closer to extinction—and estimated there were just about 1,300 adults left in the wild. MacColl thinks the actual number could be below 1,000.

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 top end.

“While that region is largely undisturbed, it has its own issues,” says MacColl, who has been studying the bird for almost a decade.

“I worry about climate change and particularly the immense heat and thermal threat risk for the juveniles. Then there’s the ongoing threat of environmental destruction from farming, forestry, and resource extraction.”

GPS monitoring has shown that some juveniles take a dangerous 1,500km flight south to the Australian interior for about most of the year—perhaps honing their skills—before coming back for good to their coastal boltholes.

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

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

The Red Goshawk ‘Stare’

Red goshawks can be difficult to see and have huge home ranges—perhaps as big as 600 square kilometers—and would historically have always been sparsely distributed around the landscape, while hugging shorelines and waterways.

They are not noisy, and Seaton says while most large birds will flee if a human approaches, alerting anyone searching for them, a red goshawk “will just stare 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 stronghold).

A conservation group has been training local guardians and traditional owners in the north to spot the birds and observe behavior in their metre-wide nests—built out of sturdy branches on horizontal branches—to see how effective they are at reproducing and get a better handle 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, observing activity at nests over half-hour intervals.

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

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

Averting Extinction

MacColl was working as an environmental scientist for Rio Tinto about a ten years back when he first saw 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—PNG’s chestnut-shouldered goshawk.

Their power amazes him. A red goshawk that heads to the ground to grab a stick will return to a branch high above “straight up,” he says. “They go straight up.”

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