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Perched in the tallest tree, often near a waterway, the scarlet raptor hunts beneath the canopy—targeting speed demons like the rainbow lorikeet and plucking them mid-flight.

The gentle hum of their deep, powerful, wide-spanning wings can be heard from below as they accelerate, then quietly diving and banking like a avian aircraft.

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

“It’s vanished all across eastern Australia, unnoticed by many,” explains a researcher from the University of Queensland and BirdLife Australia.

“It was still frequently seen in northern NSW and south-east Queensland until the 2000s, but since then, 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 recently, not much was known about the habits of Australia’s rarest bird of prey. Many enthusiasts have never seen one.

Now, researchers like MacColl are working urgently to determine how many of these birds are left so they can improve efforts to save them.

Dr Richard Seaton, a senior conservationist at BirdLife Australia, devoted time searching for them in south-east Queensland in 2013—revisiting locations where they had been observed just 15 years earlier.

“I didn’t spot any anywhere. So we started a recovery team,” he notes. “At the time, we didn’t know their home range, what habitats they needed, or truly what they were up to or where they were traveling.”

The bird certainly existed as far south as Sydney in the past. In the 1700s, a imprisoned painter named Thomas Watling drew the bird from a sample nailed to the side of a settler’s hut in Botany Bay.

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

Closer to Extinction

In 2023, the federal government updated the status of the red goshawk from vulnerable to critically threatened—labeling it as closer to extinction—and estimated there were just 1,300 adults left in the wild. MacColl thinks the actual number could be below 1,000.

The bird’s breeding areas are now restricted to the tropical savannas of the north, from the Kimberley region in the west to Cape York on Queensland’s top end.

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

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

GPS monitoring has shown that some young birds take a risky 1,500km flight south to central Australia for about eight months—possibly honing their skills—before returning for good to their coastal boltholes.

Just why the species has experienced such a rapid collapse in its territory isn’t certain, but Seaton says fragmentation of habitat is likely to blame.

“They look for the highest perch in the tallest stand, and those wooded areas aren’t that common any more,” he explains.

The Red Goshawk ‘Stare’

Red goshawks can be difficult to see and have vast territories—perhaps as big as 600 sq km—and would historically have always been sparsely distributed around the landscape, while staying close to shorelines and rivers.

They are not noisy, and Seaton says while most large birds will fly away if a human approaches, signaling anyone looking for them, a red goshawk “will just glare at you.”

There were only 10 known breeding pairs on the Australian mainland this year, Seaton reports, with 10 more on the Tiwi Islands (the largest island in the group, Melville, is now considered the red goshawk’s stronghold).

A conservation group has been educating local guardians and native custodians in the north to spot the birds and monitor activity in their metre-wide nests—built out of thick sticks on level limbs—to see how successful they are at breeding and get a clearer picture on the actual numbers of red goshawks.

Tiwi islander Chris Brogan is a firefighter for a forestry company on Melville Island and is part of a team that checks on the birds, watching activity at nests over 30-minute periods.

“They’re stunning, but they can be hard to spot because their plumage merge with the tree bark,” he comments.

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

Averting Extinction

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

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

Red goshawks are in a category of bird that has only a single relative—Papua New Guinea’s chestnut-shouldered goshawk.

Their strength impresses him. A red goshawk that heads to the forest floor to grab a stick will return to a perch high above “straight up,” he says. “They go straight up.”

“There truly is nothing like them,” says MacColl. “They’re not directly linked to any other raptor in Australia—they’re on their own branch of the evolutionary tree.

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