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Perched in the highest branches, typically near a creek, the red goshawk pursues prey under the canopy—chasing down speed demons like the colorful parrot and plucking them mid-flight.

The soft thrum of their strong, expansive, metre-wide wings is audible from below as they gain speed, before quietly diving and turning like a avian aircraft.

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

“It’s gone extinct all across eastern Australia, right under our noses,” explains Chris MacColl from the University of Queensland and a bird conservation group.

“It was regularly spotted in northern NSW and south-east Queensland up to the 2000s, but since then, the sightings have dropped off. It has vanished from known areas.”

Despite the bird being first described in 1801, it was rarely seen and, until recently, not much was known about the habits of Australia’s rarest bird of prey. Many enthusiasts have yet to spot it.

Currently, scientists like MacColl are working urgently to understand how many of these birds remain so they can improve efforts to save them.

Dr Richard Seaton, the director of terrestrial birds at BirdLife Australia, spent months looking for them in south-east Queensland in 2013—revisiting sites where they had been recorded just a decade and a half before.

“I didn’t spot any anywhere. So we started a conservation group,” he says. “At the time, we were unaware of their territory, what environments they needed, or truly what they were doing or where they were going.”

The bird 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 illustration—now stored in Britain’s Natural History Museum—found its way to British ornithologist John Latham, who used it to officially name the red goshawk in 1801.

Closer to Extinction

In 2023, the federal government updated the status of the red goshawk from vulnerable to endangered—assessing it as nearer to dying out—and calculated 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 top end.

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

“I am concerned about global warming and particularly the extreme temperatures and overheating dangers for the young birds. Then there’s the continuing risk of environmental destruction from farming, logging, and resource extraction.”

Satellite tracking has shown that some young birds take a risky 1,500km flight south to the Australian interior for about most of the year—perhaps learning how to hunt—before returning for good to their coastal boltholes.

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

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

The Red Goshawk ‘Stare’

Red goshawks can be difficult to see and have huge home ranges—possibly as big as 600 square kilometers—and would historically have always been sparsely distributed around the landscape, while staying close to coastal areas and waterways.

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 10 more on the Tiwi archipelago (the biggest landmass in the group, Melville, is now regarded as the red goshawk’s main habitat).

A conservation group has been educating local guardians and native custodians in the north to identify the birds and monitor activity in their metre-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 actual numbers 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 checks on the birds, watching activity at nests over half-hour intervals.

“They’re beautiful, but they can be tricky to see because their plumage merge with the tree bark,” he comments.

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

Preventing Disappearance

MacColl was working as an ecology expert 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 category of bird that has only one other known member—PNG’s chestnut-shouldered goshawk.

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

“There truly is nothing like them,” says MacColl. “They’re not closely related to any other bird of prey in Australia—they’re on their own branch of the evolutionary tree.

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