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Perched in the highest branches, often near a waterway, the scarlet raptor pursues prey under the canopy—targeting swift prey like the colorful parrot and plucking them mid-flight.

The soft thrum of their strong, expansive, wide-spanning wings is audible from below as they accelerate, then quietly diving and turning like a avian aircraft.

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

“It’s gone extinct all across eastern Australia, unnoticed by many,” explains a researcher from the Queensland University and a bird conservation group.

“It was still frequently seen in northern New South Wales and south-east Queensland up to the 2000s, but after that, the records completely disappear. It has fallen off the map.”

Despite the bird being initially documented in 1801, it was rarely seen and, until modern times, not much was known about the habits of Australia’s rarest bird of prey. Most birdwatchers have yet to spot it.

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

Dr Richard Seaton, a senior conservationist at a leading bird organization, devoted time looking for them in southeast QLD in 2013—returning to locations where they had been observed just a decade and a half before.

“I couldn’t find them anywhere. So we started a conservation group,” he notes. “At the time, we were unaware of their territory, what environments they required, or really what they were doing or where they were traveling.”

The bird was present 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 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 formally describe the red goshawk in 1801.

Closer to Extinction

In 2023, the federal government changed the classification of the red goshawk from vulnerable to critically threatened—labeling it as closer to extinction—and estimated there were just about 1,300 adults left in the wild. MacColl thinks the true count 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 northern tip.

“While that region is mostly intact, it has its own problems,” says MacColl, who has been researching the bird for almost a decade.

“I worry about global warming and particularly the extreme temperatures and thermal threat risk for the young birds. Then there’s the ongoing threat of habitat loss from agriculture, logging, and mining.”

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

Just why the species has suffered such a rapid collapse in its territory isn’t clear, but Seaton says fragmentation of habitat is probably the cause.

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

The Red Goshawk ‘Stare’

Red goshawks can be hard to spot and have vast territories—possibly as big as 600 square kilometers—and would historically have always been thinly spread around the landscape, while hugging shorelines and waterways.

They are quiet birds, and Seaton says while many raptors will flee if a human gets close, 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 says, with 10 more on the Tiwi Islands (the largest island in the group, Melville, is now considered the red goshawk’s stronghold).

BirdLife Australia has been educating Indigenous rangers and native custodians in the north to identify the birds and monitor activity in their metre-wide nests—built out of sturdy branches on level limbs—to see how successful they are at breeding and get a clearer picture on the true population of red goshawks.

Tiwi islander Chris Brogan is a fire management worker for a forestry company on Melville Island and is part of a team that checks on the birds, observing activity at nests over half-hour intervals.

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

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

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 western Cape York.

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

Red goshawks are in a genus of bird that has only one other known member—Papua New Guinea’s brown-shouldered raptor.

Their power impresses him. A red goshawk that goes to the forest floor to grab a stick will return to a perch 30 metres up “straight up,” he says. “They go directly upward.”

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

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