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Perched in the highest branches, often near a waterway, the red goshawk hunts beneath the canopy—chasing down speed demons like the colorful parrot and plucking them from the air.

The soft thrum of their strong, expansive, metre-wide wings can be heard from below as they accelerate, then quietly diving and turning like a feathered fighter jet.

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

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

“It was regularly spotted in northern New South Wales and southeast QLD up to the 2000s, but since then, the sightings have dropped off. It has vanished from known areas.”

Although the bird being first described in 1801, it was rarely seen and, until recently, relatively little was known about the habits of Australia’s most uncommon raptor. Many enthusiasts have yet to spot it.

Currently, researchers like MacColl are working urgently to understand how many of these birds remain so they can refine conservation plans.

A bird expert, a senior conservationist at BirdLife Australia, devoted time searching for them in southeast QLD in 2013—revisiting locations where they had been observed just 15 years earlier.

“I didn’t spot any anywhere. So we formed a recovery team,” he notes. “At the time, we didn’t know their home range, what environments 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 late 18th century, a imprisoned painter 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 a UK museum—found its way to British ornithologist John Latham, who used it to officially name the red goshawk in 1801.

Closer to Extinction

In 2023, the federal government updated the classification of the red goshawk from at risk to critically threatened—labeling it as nearer to dying out—and estimated there were just 1,300 adults left in the wild. MacColl thinks the true count could be below 1,000.

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 Peninsula on Queensland’s northern tip.

“While that region is largely undisturbed, it has its own issues,” says MacColl, who has been studying the bird for almost a decade.

“I worry about global warming and particularly the immense heat and overheating dangers for the juveniles. Then there’s the ongoing threat of habitat loss from agriculture, logging, and mining.”

GPS monitoring has revealed that some young birds undertake a risky 1,500-kilometer flight south to the Australian interior for about eight months—possibly learning how to hunt—before coming back for good to their coastal boltholes.

Just why the species has experienced such a swift decline in its range isn’t clear, but Seaton says broken-up environments is probably the cause.

“They seek out the tallest tree in the tallest stand, and those wooded areas are increasingly rare any more,” he says.

The Red Goshawk ‘Glare’

Red goshawks can be difficult to see and have huge home ranges—possibly as big as 600 sq km—and would historically have always been thinly spread around the landscape, while hugging coastal areas and waterways.

They are quiet birds, and Seaton says while most large birds will fly away if a human gets close, alerting anyone looking 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 biggest landmass in the group, Melville, is now regarded as the red goshawk’s main habitat).

A conservation group has been educating Indigenous rangers and native custodians in the north to spot the birds and monitor activity in their metre-wide nests—constructed 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 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 beautiful, but they can be tricky to see because their colors blend in with the trunks of the trees,” he says.

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

Preventing Disappearance

MacColl was working as an ecology expert for Rio Tinto about a ten years back when he initially spotted a red goshawk nest in western Cape York.

“I have been completely captivated ever since,” he admits.

Red goshawks are in a category 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 forest floor to grab a stick will fly back to a perch 30 metres up “straight up,” he says. “They go directly upward.”

“There really is nothing like them,” says MacColl. “They’re not directly linked to any other bird of prey in Australia—they’re on their unique limb of the evolutionary tree.

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