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Nesting in the highest branches, often near a waterway, the red goshawk hunts beneath the canopy—chasing down speed demons like the rainbow lorikeet and snatching them mid-flight.

The soft thrum of their strong, expansive, metre-wide wings is audible from below as they accelerate, before quietly diving and banking like a feathered fighter jet.

Yet the sight of the red goshawk—a species found only in Australia—is vanishing from the Australian landscape.

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

“It was still frequently seen in northern NSW and southeast QLD up to the 2000s, but after that, the records completely disappear. It has vanished from known areas.”

Although the bird being first described in 1801, it was never a common sight 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 refine efforts to save them.

A bird expert, the director of terrestrial birds at BirdLife Australia, devoted time looking for them in southeast QLD in 2013—revisiting locations where they had been observed just a decade and a half before.

“I didn’t spot any anywhere. So we started a recovery team,” he notes. “At the time, we didn’t know their territory, what environments they required, 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 settler’s hut in Botany Bay.

That drawing—now stored 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.

Nearer to Vanishing

In 2023, the national authorities changed the status of the red goshawk from at risk to critically threatened—assessing it as closer to extinction—and calculated there were just 1,300 adults left in the wild. MacColl believes the true count could be below 1,000.

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

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

“I am concerned about global warming and particularly 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.”

GPS monitoring has revealed that some young birds take a dangerous 1,500-kilometer flight south to central Australia for about most of the year—perhaps honing their skills—before coming back for good to their coastal boltholes.

The reason the species has experienced such a rapid collapse in its range isn’t certain, but Seaton says broken-up environments is probably the cause.

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

The Red Goshawk ‘Glare’

Red goshawks can be hard to spot and have huge home ranges—perhaps 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 many raptors will flee if a human approaches, signaling anyone looking for them, a red goshawk “will just stare at you.”

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

A conservation group has been training Indigenous rangers and native custodians in the north to identify the birds and observe behavior in their wide nests—built out of thick sticks on horizontal branches—to see how successful they are at reproducing and get a clearer picture on the true population of red goshawks.

Local resident Chris Brogan is a firefighter for a forestry company 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 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 decade ago when he initially spotted a red goshawk nest in Cape York’s west.

“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 chestnut-shouldered goshawk.

Their strength amazes him. A red goshawk that heads to the ground to collect a stick will fly back 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 collaboration of experts together—and the best information possible to know what they require. That’s how we save the species.”