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Nesting in the tallest tree, often near a creek, the red goshawk hunts beneath the canopy—targeting swift prey like the rainbow lorikeet and snatching them from the air.

The soft thrum of their deep, powerful, wide-spanning wings can be heard from below as they gain speed, before silently swooping and turning like a feathered fighter jet.

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,” explains a researcher from the University of Queensland and BirdLife Australia.

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

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

Now, scientists like MacColl are in a race to understand the number of these birds remain so they can refine conservation plans.

A bird expert, a senior conservationist at a leading bird organization, devoted time looking for them in south-east Queensland in 2013—revisiting sites where they had been recorded just a decade and a half before.

“I couldn’t find them anywhere. So we formed a recovery team,” he says. “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 traveling.”

The species certainly existed as far south as Sydney in the past. In the 1700s, a convict artist named Thomas Watling sketched the bird from a specimen nailed to the side of a settler’s hut in Botany Bay.

That drawing—now stored in Britain’s Natural History 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 national authorities updated the status of the red goshawk from vulnerable 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 true count could be under a thousand.

The bird’s breeding areas are now restricted to the northern grasslands 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 problems,” says MacColl, who has been researching the bird for almost a decade.

“I am concerned about climate change and particularly the immense heat and thermal threat risk for the juveniles. Then there’s the continuing risk 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 seaside homes.

Just why the species has suffered such a swift decline in its range isn’t certain, but Seaton says broken-up environments is probably the cause.

“They look for the highest perch in the largest grove, and those wooded areas aren’t that common any more,” he says.

The Red Goshawk ‘Glare’

Red goshawks can be difficult to see and have vast territories—perhaps as big as 600 sq km—and would traditionally have always been sparsely distributed around the landscape, while staying close to shorelines and rivers.

They are not noisy, 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 ten recorded pairs on the Australian mainland this year, Seaton says, with another ten on the Tiwi archipelago (the largest island in the group, Melville, is now considered the red goshawk’s main habitat).

BirdLife Australia has been training local guardians and native custodians in the north to identify 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 better handle on the true population of red goshawks.

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

“They’re stunning, but they can be hard to spot because their plumage blend in with the tree bark,” he says.

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

Preventing Disappearance

MacColl was working as an environmental scientist for a mining firm about a decade ago when he first saw 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—Papua New Guinea’s brown-shouldered raptor.

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

“There truly is no other bird like it,” says MacColl. “They’re not directly linked to any other bird of prey in Australia—they’re on their unique limb of the evolutionary tree.

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