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

The gentle hum of their strong, expansive, wide-spanning 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 species found nowhere else on Earth—is vanishing from the Australian landscape.

“It’s vanished all across eastern Australia, unnoticed by many,” states Chris MacColl from the University of Queensland and a bird conservation group.

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

Although the bird being first described in 1801, it was rarely seen and, until recently, not much was known about the behavior of Australia’s rarest bird of prey. Most birdwatchers have never seen one.

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

Dr Richard Seaton, the director of terrestrial birds at a leading bird organization, devoted time searching for them in southeast QLD in 2013—returning to locations where they had been observed just 15 years earlier.

“I couldn’t find them anywhere. So we formed a conservation group,” he notes. “At the time, we were unaware of their home range, what environments they needed, or truly what they were doing or where they were going.”

The species certainly existed as far south as Sydney in the past. In the 1700s, a imprisoned painter named Thomas Watling sketched the bird from a sample attached to the side of a pioneer’s home 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 officially name the red goshawk in 1801.

Closer to Extinction

In 2023, the national authorities updated the status of the red goshawk from vulnerable to endangered—assessing it as closer to extinction—and calculated there were just about 1,300 mature birds left in the wild. MacColl believes the true count could be below 1,000.

The bird’s nesting sites are now limited 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 am concerned about climate change and particularly the extreme temperatures and thermal threat risk for the juveniles. Then there’s the ongoing threat of habitat loss from agriculture, logging, and mining.”

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

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

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

The Red Goshawk ‘Stare’

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 thinly spread around the landscape, while hugging coastal areas and rivers.

They are not noisy, and Seaton says while most large birds will fly away if a human approaches, signaling 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 archipelago (the biggest landmass in the group, Melville, is now considered 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—constructed out of thick sticks on horizontal branches—to see how successful they are at reproducing and get a better handle 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 checks on the birds, watching activity at nests over 30-minute periods.

“They’re beautiful, but they can be hard to spot because their plumage merge with the trunks of the trees,” he says.

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

Averting Extinction

MacColl was working as an environmental scientist for Rio Tinto 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 category of bird that has only a single relative—PNG’s brown-shouldered raptor.

Their strength impresses him. A red goshawk that goes to the ground to collect a stick will fly back to a perch high above “straight up,” he says. “They go straight up.”

“There really is nothing like them,” says MacColl. “They’re not closely related to any other bird of prey in Australia—they’re on their own branch of the family tree.

“We are going to need a network of experts together—and the best information possible to know what they need. That’s how we avert extinction.”