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Nesting in the highest branches, typically near a creek, the scarlet raptor hunts beneath the canopy—chasing down speed demons like the rainbow lorikeet and snatching them mid-flight.

The soft thrum of their deep, powerful, metre-wide wings is audible from below as they gain speed, then silently swooping and banking like a avian aircraft.

Yet the sight 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,” states a researcher from the University of Queensland and BirdLife Australia.

“It was regularly spotted in northern NSW and southeast QLD up to the 2000s, but since then, the sightings completely disappear. 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 behavior of Australia’s rarest bird of prey. Many enthusiasts have never seen one.

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

A bird expert, the director of terrestrial birds at BirdLife Australia, spent months looking for them in south-east Queensland in 2013—returning to sites where they had been recorded just 15 years earlier.

“I couldn’t find them anywhere. So we formed a recovery team,” he says. “At the time, we didn’t know their home range, what habitats they required, or truly what they were doing or where they were going.”

The species was present as far south as Sydney in the past. In the late 18th century, a convict artist named Thomas Watling drew the bird from a sample attached to the side of a settler’s hut in Botany Bay.

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

Closer to Extinction

In 2023, the national authorities changed the status of the red goshawk from vulnerable to endangered—assessing it as closer to extinction—and estimated there were just 1,300 mature birds left in the wild. MacColl thinks the true count could be under a thousand.

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

“While that area is largely undisturbed, it has its own issues,” says MacColl, who has been researching the bird for seven years.

“I am concerned about climate change and especially the immense heat and thermal threat risk for the young birds. Then there’s the ongoing threat of habitat loss from agriculture, logging, and resource extraction.”

Satellite tracking has shown that some young birds undertake a risky 1,500-kilometer flight south to central Australia for about most of the year—perhaps learning how to hunt—before returning for good to their coastal boltholes.

Just why the species has experienced such a rapid collapse in its territory 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 wooded areas are increasingly rare any more,” he says.

The Red Goshawk ‘Glare’

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

They are quiet birds, and Seaton says while many raptors will fly away if a human gets close, signaling anyone searching for them, a red goshawk “will just glare at you.”

There were only ten recorded pairs on the continent this year, Seaton says, with another ten on the Tiwi Islands (the largest island in the group, Melville, is now considered the red goshawk’s stronghold).

BirdLife Australia has been training 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 level limbs—to see how effective they are at reproducing and get a clearer picture on the actual numbers of red goshawks.

Tiwi islander Chris Brogan is a fire management worker for Plantation Management Partners on Melville Island and is part of a team that monitors the birds, watching activity at nests over 30-minute periods.

“They’re beautiful, but they can be hard to spot because their plumage blend in with the tree bark,” he says.

“When I started, I assumed they were just common. I believed they were widespread. But it’s a bird that’s disappearing.”

Averting Extinction

MacColl was working as an environmental scientist for a mining firm about a decade ago when he initially spotted 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 a single relative—PNG’s brown-shouldered raptor.

Their power amazes him. A red goshawk that goes to the ground to collect a stick will fly back to a branch 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 unique limb of the evolutionary tree.

“We are going to need a network of experts united—and the most accurate data possible to know what they need. That’s how we save the species.”