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Nesting in the highest branches, typically near a waterway, the scarlet raptor hunts beneath the canopy—chasing down swift prey like the rainbow lorikeet and plucking them from the air.

The gentle hum of their strong, expansive, wide-spanning wings can be heard from below as they gain speed, then quietly diving and banking like a avian aircraft.

Yet the spectacle 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 University of Queensland and a bird conservation group.

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

Although the bird being first described in 1801, it was rarely seen and, until modern times, relatively little was known about the habits of Australia’s most uncommon raptor. Most birdwatchers have yet to spot it.

Now, scientists like MacColl are working urgently to understand the number of these birds remain so they can improve efforts to save them.

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

“I couldn’t find them anywhere. So we formed 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 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 stored in a UK museum—was passed to English bird expert John Latham, who used it to officially name the red goshawk in 1801.

Closer to Extinction

In 2023, the federal government changed the classification of the red goshawk from vulnerable to endangered—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 northern grasslands of the north, from the Kimberley in the west to Cape York on Queensland’s top end.

“While that area is mostly intact, it has its own issues,” says MacColl, who has been researching the bird for seven years.

“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 farming, logging, and resource extraction.”

Satellite tracking has shown that some young birds undertake a risky 1,500km flight south to central Australia for about eight months—possibly honing their skills—before coming back for good to their seaside homes.

Just why the species has experienced such a swift decline in its range isn’t clear, but Seaton says broken-up environments is likely to blame.

“They look for the tallest tree in the largest grove, and those stands of trees aren’t that common any more,” he says.

The Red Goshawk ‘Glare’

Red goshawks can be difficult to see and have huge home ranges—possibly as big as 600 sq km—and would traditionally have always been sparsely distributed around the landscape, while hugging shorelines and rivers.

They are not noisy, and Seaton says while most large birds will fly away if a human gets close, alerting anyone searching for them, a red goshawk “will just stare at you.”

There were only ten recorded pairs on the Australian mainland this year, Seaton says, with 10 more on the Tiwi archipelago (the largest island in the group, Melville, is now regarded as the red goshawk’s stronghold).

BirdLife Australia has been training Indigenous rangers and native custodians in the north to spot the birds and observe behavior in their metre-wide nests—constructed out of sturdy branches on level limbs—to see how successful they are at breeding and get a clearer picture on the actual numbers of red goshawks.

Local resident 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 half-hour intervals.

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

“When I began, 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 decade ago when he first saw a red goshawk nest in western Cape York.

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

Red goshawks are in a genus of bird that has only one other known member—PNG’s chestnut-shouldered goshawk.

Their strength amazes him. A red goshawk that goes to the forest floor to grab a stick will fly back to a perch high above “vertically,” he says. “They go straight up.”

“There really is no other bird like it,” 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 experts together—and the best information possible to know what they require. That’s how we save the species.”