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Perched in the highest branches, typically near a creek, the red goshawk pursues prey under the canopy—chasing down swift prey like the colorful parrot and snatching them mid-flight.

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

Yet the spectacle of the red goshawk—a bird found nowhere else on Earth—is vanishing from the Australian landscape.

“It’s gone extinct throughout eastern Australia, unnoticed by many,” states Chris MacColl from the Queensland University and a bird conservation group.

“It was still frequently seen in northern New South Wales and southeast QLD up to the 2000s, but after that, the records completely disappear. It has fallen off the map.”

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

Now, scientists like MacColl are working urgently to understand how many of these birds remain so they can improve conservation plans.

Dr Richard Seaton, a senior conservationist at a leading bird organization, spent months searching for them in southeast QLD in 2013—revisiting sites where they had been recorded just a decade and a half before.

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

The bird was present as far south as Sydney in the past. In the 1700s, 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 Britain’s Natural History Museum—was passed to British ornithologist John Latham, who used it to officially name the red goshawk in 1801.

Closer to Extinction

In 2023, the federal government changed the classification of the red goshawk from vulnerable 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 thinks the actual number could be under a thousand.

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

“While that area is mostly intact, 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 extreme temperatures 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 juveniles undertake a risky 1,500-kilometer flight south to central Australia for about most of the year—possibly learning how to hunt—before returning for good to their coastal boltholes.

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

“They seek out the tallest tree 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 square kilometers—and would historically have always been thinly spread around the landscape, while staying close to coastal areas and waterways.

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

There were only 10 known breeding pairs on the continent this year, Seaton says, with another ten on the Tiwi Islands (the biggest landmass in the group, Melville, is now regarded as the red goshawk’s main habitat).

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 thick sticks on horizontal branches—to see how effective they are at reproducing and get a clearer picture on the actual numbers of red goshawks.

Local resident 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 30-minute periods.

“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 assumed they were just common. I thought they were everywhere. But it’s a bird that’s disappearing.”

Preventing Disappearance

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 a single relative—PNG’s chestnut-shouldered goshawk.

Their power impresses him. A red goshawk that heads to the forest floor to collect a stick will fly back to a branch high above “vertically,” he says. “They go straight up.”

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