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Nesting in the tallest tree, typically near a creek, the scarlet raptor hunts beneath the canopy—chasing down swift prey like the colorful parrot and plucking them mid-flight.

The gentle hum of their deep, powerful, metre-wide wings is audible from below as they accelerate, before silently swooping and banking like a avian aircraft.

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

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

“It was regularly spotted in northern NSW and south-east Queensland up to the 2000s, but since then, the records have dropped off. It has fallen off the map.”

Although the bird being first described in 1801, it was never a common sight and, until recently, not much was known about the behavior of Australia’s most uncommon raptor. Most birdwatchers have yet to spot it.

Currently, researchers like MacColl are in a race to understand how many of these birds are left so they can refine efforts to save them.

Dr Richard Seaton, a senior conservationist at BirdLife Australia, spent months looking for them in south-east Queensland in 2013—revisiting locations where they had been recorded just 15 years earlier.

“I didn’t spot any anywhere. So we formed a conservation group,” he notes. “At the time, we didn’t know their home range, what habitats they required, or really what they were up to 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 drew the bird from a sample nailed to the side of a pioneer’s home in Botany Bay.

That illustration—now housed in a UK museum—was passed to English bird expert John Latham, who used it to officially name the red goshawk in 1801.

Nearer to Vanishing

In 2023, the federal government changed the classification of the red goshawk from at risk to critically threatened—labeling it as nearer to dying out—and calculated there were just about 1,300 adults left in the wild. MacColl believes the actual number could be under a thousand.

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

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

“I worry about climate change and particularly the immense heat and overheating dangers for the young birds. Then there’s the ongoing threat of environmental destruction from farming, logging, and resource extraction.”

Satellite tracking has revealed that some juveniles undertake a dangerous 1,500-kilometer flight south to central Australia for about eight months—perhaps learning how to hunt—before coming back for good to their coastal boltholes.

The reason the species has experienced such a swift decline in its range isn’t certain, but Seaton says fragmentation of habitat is probably the cause.

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

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 traditionally have always been thinly spread around the landscape, while hugging coastal areas and rivers.

They are quiet birds, and Seaton says while most large birds will flee if a human approaches, 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 reports, with 10 more on the Tiwi archipelago (the biggest landmass in the group, Melville, is now regarded as the red goshawk’s stronghold).

BirdLife Australia has been educating Indigenous rangers 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 reproducing and get a clearer picture on the actual numbers 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, watching activity at nests over half-hour intervals.

“They’re beautiful, but they can be tricky to see because their colors merge with the trunks of the trees,” he comments.

“When I started, I thought they were just common. I thought they were widespread. 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 first saw a red goshawk nest in Cape York’s west.

“I have been totally obsessed ever since,” he admits.

Red goshawks are in a genus 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 grab a stick will return to a branch 30 metres up “straight up,” he says. “They go directly upward.”

“There truly is nothing like them,” says MacColl. “They’re not closely related 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 best information possible to know what they require. That’s how we avert extinction.”