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Nesting in the tallest tree, typically near a waterway, the red goshawk hunts beneath 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 can be heard from below as they accelerate, before silently swooping and turning like a feathered fighter jet.

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

“It’s gone extinct all across eastern Australia, right under our noses,” explains a researcher from the Queensland University and BirdLife Australia.

“It was regularly spotted in northern New South Wales and southeast QLD until 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 rarely seen and, until modern times, relatively little was known about the habits of Australia’s rarest bird of prey. Many enthusiasts have yet to spot it.

Currently, scientists like MacColl are working urgently to understand the number of these birds are left so they can improve efforts to save them.

A bird expert, a senior conservationist at a leading bird organization, devoted time searching for them in southeast QLD in 2013—returning to locations where they had been recorded just 15 years earlier.

“I didn’t spot any anywhere. So we formed a conservation group,” he says. “At the time, we didn’t know their territory, what habitats they required, or really what they were up to or where they were going.”

The species certainly existed as far south as Sydney in the past. In the 1700s, a imprisoned painter named Thomas Watling sketched the bird from a specimen attached to the side of a pioneer’s home in Botany Bay.

That drawing—now housed in Britain’s Natural History Museum—was passed to English bird expert John Latham, who used it to formally describe the red goshawk in 1801.

Closer to Extinction

In 2023, the federal government updated the classification of the red goshawk from vulnerable to critically threatened—labeling it as nearer to dying out—and calculated there were just about 1,300 adults left in the wild. MacColl believes the true count 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 Peninsula on Queensland’s northern tip.

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

“I am concerned about climate change and especially the immense heat and overheating dangers for the juveniles. Then there’s the continuing risk of habitat loss from farming, forestry, and resource extraction.”

Satellite tracking has revealed that some young birds take a dangerous 1,500km flight south to the Australian interior for about eight months—possibly honing their skills—before coming back for good to their coastal boltholes.

The reason the species has experienced such a swift decline 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 aren’t that common any more,” he explains.

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 thinly spread around the landscape, while hugging shorelines and waterways.

They are not noisy, and Seaton says while many raptors will flee if a human approaches, signaling 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 stronghold).

A conservation group has been educating local guardians and native custodians in the north to identify the birds and monitor activity in their wide nests—built out of sturdy branches on level limbs—to see how effective 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 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 stunning, but they can be tricky to see because their plumage blend in with the trunks of the trees,” he says.

“When I began, I assumed they were just another bird. I believed 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 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 genus of bird that has only one other known member—PNG’s brown-shouldered raptor.

Their strength amazes him. A red goshawk that goes to the ground to grab a stick will return to a perch high above “vertically,” he says. “They go straight up.”

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