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Perched in the highest branches, typically near a waterway, the scarlet raptor pursues prey under the canopy—targeting speed demons like the colorful parrot and snatching them mid-flight.

The soft thrum of their strong, expansive, metre-wide wings can be heard from below as they gain speed, before quietly diving and banking like a avian aircraft.

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

“It’s gone extinct throughout eastern Australia, right under our noses,” explains Chris MacColl from the Queensland University and BirdLife Australia.

“It was still frequently seen in northern NSW and south-east Queensland until the 2000s, but after that, the sightings 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, not much was known about the behavior of Australia’s rarest bird of prey. Most birdwatchers have never seen one.

Currently, scientists like MacColl are in a race to determine how many of these birds remain so they can refine conservation plans.

Dr Richard Seaton, a senior conservationist at a leading bird organization, devoted time looking for them in south-east Queensland in 2013—returning to sites where they had been observed just a decade and a half before.

“I couldn’t find them anywhere. So we started a recovery team,” he says. “At the time, we didn’t know their territory, what habitats they required, 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 drew the bird from a specimen attached to the side of a pioneer’s home in Botany Bay.

That drawing—now housed in a UK museum—was passed to British ornithologist John Latham, who used it to formally describe 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 estimated there were just 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 region in the west to Cape York on Queensland’s northern tip.

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

“I worry about climate change and especially the extreme temperatures and thermal threat risk for the juveniles. Then there’s the continuing risk of environmental destruction from agriculture, logging, and resource extraction.”

GPS monitoring has revealed that some juveniles take a risky 1,500-kilometer flight south to the Australian interior for about eight months—perhaps honing their skills—before returning for good to their seaside homes.

Just why the species has suffered such a rapid collapse in its territory isn’t clear, but Seaton says broken-up environments is probably the cause.

“They look for the tallest tree in the largest grove, and those stands of trees are increasingly rare any more,” he explains.

The Red Goshawk ‘Glare’

Red goshawks can be hard to spot and have huge home ranges—possibly as big as 600 sq km—and would historically have always been thinly spread around the landscape, while staying close to shorelines and rivers.

They are quiet birds, and Seaton says while most large birds will flee if a human approaches, signaling anyone looking for them, a red goshawk “will just stare at you.”

There were only ten recorded pairs on the continent this year, Seaton reports, with 10 more on the Tiwi Islands (the largest island in the group, Melville, is now considered the red goshawk’s main habitat).

BirdLife Australia has been training Indigenous rangers and native custodians in the north to identify the birds and observe behavior in their wide nests—constructed out of thick sticks on level limbs—to see how successful they are at reproducing and get a clearer picture on the true population of red goshawks.

Tiwi islander 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 beautiful, but they can be hard to spot because their plumage blend in with the trunks of the trees,” he says.

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

Averting Extinction

MacColl was working as an ecology expert for Rio Tinto about a ten years back when he first saw a red goshawk nest in western Cape York.

“I have been completely captivated ever since,” he says.

Red goshawks are in a category of bird that has only a single relative—Papua New Guinea’s chestnut-shouldered goshawk.

Their strength impresses him. A red goshawk that heads to the forest floor to collect a stick will return to a branch 30 metres up “straight up,” 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 unique limb of the evolutionary tree.

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