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Perched in the highest branches, often near a waterway, the red goshawk hunts beneath the canopy—targeting swift prey like the rainbow lorikeet and plucking them from the air.

The soft thrum of their deep, powerful, metre-wide wings can be heard from below as they gain speed, before quietly diving and turning like a avian aircraft.

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

“It’s vanished throughout eastern Australia, right under our noses,” explains a researcher from the Queensland University and BirdLife Australia.

“It was still frequently seen in northern New South Wales and southeast QLD until the 2000s, but after that, the records have dropped off. It has vanished from known areas.”

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 rarest bird of prey. Most birdwatchers have never seen one.

Currently, scientists like MacColl are in a race to determine the number of these birds are left so they can refine conservation plans.

A bird expert, the director of terrestrial birds at a leading bird organization, devoted time looking for them in south-east Queensland in 2013—returning to locations where they had been observed just a decade and a half before.

“I didn’t spot any anywhere. So we formed a recovery team,” he says. “At the time, we were unaware of their home range, what environments they required, or really what they were doing 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 sample attached to the side of a pioneer’s home in Botany Bay.

That drawing—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.

Closer to Extinction

In 2023, the federal government updated the status of the red goshawk from at risk to critically threatened—assessing it as nearer to dying out—and calculated there were just about 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 region in the west to Cape York on Queensland’s northern tip.

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

“I am concerned about global warming and particularly the extreme temperatures and overheating dangers for the young birds. Then there’s the ongoing threat of habitat loss from farming, logging, and mining.”

Satellite tracking has shown that some juveniles take a dangerous 1,500km flight south to central Australia for about most of the year—possibly honing their skills—before returning for good to their seaside homes.

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

“They look for the highest perch in the largest grove, and those stands of trees are increasingly rare any more,” he explains.

The Red Goshawk ‘Glare’

Red goshawks can be hard to spot and have huge home ranges—perhaps as big as 600 square kilometers—and would historically have always been sparsely distributed around the landscape, while staying close to coastal areas and waterways.

They are not noisy, and Seaton says while most large birds will fly away if a human gets close, 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 10 more on the Tiwi archipelago (the largest island in the group, Melville, is now considered the red goshawk’s stronghold).

A conservation group has been educating local guardians and traditional owners in the north to spot the birds and monitor activity in their wide nests—built out of thick sticks on horizontal branches—to see how effective they are at breeding and get a clearer picture on the actual numbers of red goshawks.

Tiwi islander 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 stunning, but they can be hard to spot because their colors merge with the tree bark,” he says.

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

Preventing Disappearance

MacColl was working as an ecology expert for a mining firm about a decade ago when he initially spotted a red goshawk nest in western Cape York.

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

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 goes to the ground to collect a stick will fly back to a branch high above “straight up,” he says. “They go directly upward.”

“There really is no other bird like it,” says MacColl. “They’re not directly linked to any other raptor in Australia—they’re on their unique limb of the family 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.”