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Perched in the tallest tree, often near a waterway, the red goshawk hunts beneath the canopy—chasing down speed demons like the rainbow lorikeet and snatching them mid-flight.

The soft thrum of their deep, powerful, wide-spanning 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 only in Australia—is disappearing from the Australian landscape.

“It’s vanished throughout eastern Australia, right under our noses,” states 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 sightings completely disappear. It has fallen off the map.”

Although the bird being first described in 1801, it was rarely seen and, until modern times, not much was known about the behavior of Australia’s rarest bird of prey. Most birdwatchers have yet to spot it.

Now, scientists like MacColl are in a race to understand the number of these birds are left so they can improve 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 locations 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 didn’t know their territory, what habitats they needed, or truly what they were doing or where they were traveling.”

The species certainly existed as far south as Sydney in the past. In the late 18th century, a imprisoned painter named Thomas Watling drew 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 British ornithologist John Latham, who used it to officially name the red goshawk in 1801.

Closer to Extinction

In 2023, the federal government changed the status of the red goshawk from vulnerable to critically threatened—assessing it as nearer to dying out—and estimated there were just 1,300 adults left in the wild. MacColl thinks the actual number could be under a thousand.

The bird’s breeding areas are now restricted to the tropical savannas of the north, from the Kimberley in the west to Cape York on Queensland’s top end.

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

“I am concerned about climate change and particularly the extreme temperatures and overheating dangers for the young birds. Then there’s the continuing risk of habitat loss from agriculture, forestry, and mining.”

Satellite tracking has revealed that some juveniles undertake a risky 1,500km flight south to the Australian interior for about most of the year—possibly honing their skills—before coming back for good to their seaside homes.

The reason the species has suffered such a swift decline in its territory isn’t certain, but Seaton says fragmentation of habitat is likely to blame.

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

The Red Goshawk ‘Glare’

Red goshawks can be difficult to see and have huge home ranges—perhaps as big as 600 square kilometers—and would traditionally have always been thinly spread around the landscape, while staying close to coastal areas and rivers.

They are not noisy, and Seaton says while most large birds will flee if a human approaches, signaling anyone searching 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 archipelago (the largest island in the group, Melville, is now regarded as the red goshawk’s main habitat).

A conservation group has been educating local guardians and traditional owners in the north to identify the birds and observe behavior in their metre-wide nests—built out of sturdy branches on level limbs—to see how effective they are at breeding and get a better handle on the true population of red goshawks.

Local resident Chris Brogan is a firefighter for a forestry company on Melville Island and is part of a team that monitors the birds, watching activity at nests over 30-minute periods.

“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 another bird. I thought they were everywhere. But it’s a bird that’s vanishing.”

Preventing Disappearance

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 a single relative—PNG’s brown-shouldered raptor.

Their power impresses him. A red goshawk that goes to the ground to collect a stick will fly back to a branch 30 metres up “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 raptor in Australia—they’re on their unique limb of the family tree.

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