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Perched in the tallest tree, often near a waterway, the red goshawk hunts beneath the canopy—targeting speed demons like the rainbow lorikeet and snatching them from the air.

The soft thrum of their strong, expansive, metre-wide wings can be heard from below as they accelerate, before silently swooping and turning like a feathered fighter jet.

Yet the spectacle of the red goshawk—a species found only in Australia—is disappearing from the Australian landscape.

“It’s vanished throughout eastern Australia, right under our noses,” states Chris MacColl from the Queensland University and a bird conservation group.

“It was regularly spotted in northern NSW and southeast QLD until the 2000s, but since then, the records have dropped off. It has vanished from known areas.”

Despite the bird being initially documented in 1801, it was rarely seen and, until recently, relatively little was known about the behavior of Australia’s rarest bird of prey. Most birdwatchers have never seen one.

Now, researchers like MacColl are in a race to determine the number of these birds are left so they can refine conservation plans.

Dr Richard Seaton, a senior conservationist at BirdLife Australia, spent months looking for them in southeast QLD in 2013—revisiting sites where they had been observed just 15 years earlier.

“I didn’t spot any anywhere. So we started a recovery team,” he notes. “At the time, we were unaware of their territory, what habitats they required, or really what they were doing or where they were going.”

The bird was present as far south as Sydney in the past. In the 1700s, a convict artist named Thomas Watling drew the bird from a sample attached 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 formally describe the red goshawk in 1801.

Closer to Extinction

In 2023, the national authorities updated the classification of the red goshawk from vulnerable to endangered—assessing it as nearer to dying out—and calculated there were just about 1,300 mature birds left in the wild. MacColl believes the true count could be below 1,000.

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 top end.

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

“I worry about global warming and especially the immense heat and overheating dangers for the juveniles. Then there’s the ongoing threat of habitat loss from farming, forestry, and resource extraction.”

Satellite tracking has revealed that some juveniles undertake a risky 1,500km flight south to central Australia for about eight months—perhaps honing their skills—before returning for good to their seaside homes.

The reason the species has suffered such a swift decline in its territory isn’t clear, but Seaton says broken-up environments 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 says.

The Red Goshawk ‘Stare’

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

They are not noisy, 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 another ten on the Tiwi archipelago (the largest island in the group, Melville, is now considered the red goshawk’s main habitat).

A conservation group has been educating Indigenous rangers and native custodians in the north to identify the birds and monitor activity in their wide nests—constructed out of sturdy branches on horizontal branches—to see how successful they are at reproducing and get a better handle on the true population of red goshawks.

Tiwi islander Chris Brogan is a firefighter for Plantation Management Partners on Melville Island and is part of a team that monitors the birds, observing activity at nests over 30-minute periods.

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

“When I started, I assumed they were just another bird. I believed they were widespread. But it’s a bird that’s disappearing.”

Averting Extinction

MacColl was working as an environmental scientist for a mining firm about a ten years back when he first saw a red goshawk nest in Cape York’s west.

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

Red goshawks are in a category of bird that has only one other known member—Papua New Guinea’s chestnut-shouldered goshawk.

Their strength impresses him. A red goshawk that goes to the forest floor to grab a stick will return to a branch 30 metres up “vertically,” he says. “They go directly upward.”

“There truly is nothing like them,” 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 network of experts together—and the best information possible to know what they require. That’s how we avert extinction.”