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Nesting in the highest branches, often near a creek, the scarlet raptor pursues prey under the canopy—targeting swift prey like the rainbow lorikeet and plucking them mid-flight.

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

Yet the spectacle of the red goshawk—a bird found only in Australia—is vanishing from the Australian landscape.

“It’s gone extinct all across eastern Australia, unnoticed by many,” explains Chris MacColl from the University of Queensland and BirdLife Australia.

“It was regularly spotted in northern NSW and southeast QLD up to the 2000s, but after that, the sightings have dropped off. It has vanished from known areas.”

Despite the bird being first described 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, scientists like MacColl are in a race to determine the number of these birds remain so they can refine efforts to save them.

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

“I couldn’t find them anywhere. So we started a recovery team,” he says. “At the time, we were unaware of their home range, what habitats they needed, or truly what they were up to or where they were going.”

The species was present as far south as Sydney in the past. In the 1700s, a convict artist named Thomas Watling drew the bird from a sample nailed to the side of a pioneer’s home in Botany Bay.

That illustration—now stored in Britain’s Natural History Museum—found its way to English bird expert John Latham, who used it to officially name the red goshawk in 1801.

Nearer to Vanishing

In 2023, the national authorities changed the classification of the red goshawk from at risk to endangered—labeling it as nearer to dying out—and estimated there were just 1,300 adults left in the wild. MacColl thinks the actual number could be below 1,000.

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

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

“I am concerned about global warming and especially the extreme temperatures and overheating dangers for the juveniles. Then there’s the ongoing threat of environmental destruction from farming, logging, and mining.”

GPS monitoring has revealed 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 coming back for good to their seaside homes.

Just why the species has experienced such a swift decline in its territory isn’t clear, but Seaton says fragmentation of habitat is probably the cause.

“They seek out the highest perch in the tallest stand, and those wooded areas 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 sq km—and would traditionally have always been sparsely distributed around the landscape, while staying close to coastal areas and rivers.

They are quiet birds, and Seaton says while most large birds will fly away if a human gets close, signaling 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 Islands (the largest island in the group, Melville, is now regarded as the red goshawk’s main habitat).

BirdLife Australia has been educating Indigenous rangers and traditional owners in the north to identify the birds and monitor activity in their metre-wide nests—built out of thick sticks on level limbs—to see how effective they are at reproducing and get a better handle on the true population 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 monitors the birds, observing activity at nests over half-hour intervals.

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

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

Averting Extinction

MacColl was working as an ecology expert 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 says.

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

Their power impresses him. A red goshawk that goes to the forest floor to collect a stick will fly back to a perch 30 metres up “vertically,” he says. “They go straight up.”

“There really is no other bird like it,” says MacColl. “They’re not closely related to any other raptor in Australia—they’re on their own branch of the family tree.

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