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Perched in the tallest tree, often near a creek, the scarlet raptor pursues prey under the canopy—chasing down swift prey like the colorful parrot and snatching them mid-flight.

The soft thrum of their deep, powerful, metre-wide wings is audible from below as they accelerate, before silently swooping and banking like a feathered fighter jet.

Yet the sight of the red goshawk—a species found only in Australia—is vanishing from the continent’s terrain.

“It’s vanished all across eastern Australia, right under our noses,” states a researcher from the University of Queensland and BirdLife Australia.

“It was regularly spotted in northern New South Wales and south-east Queensland up to the 2000s, but after that, the sightings completely disappear. 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 most uncommon raptor. Many enthusiasts have never seen one.

Now, scientists like MacColl are working urgently to determine the number of these birds remain so they can refine efforts to save them.

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

“I couldn’t find them anywhere. So we formed a conservation group,” he says. “At the time, we were unaware of their territory, what habitats they required, or really what they were doing or where they were traveling.”

The bird certainly existed 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 pioneer’s home in Botany Bay.

That illustration—now housed in a UK museum—found its way to English bird expert John Latham, who used it to officially name the red goshawk in 1801.

Nearer to Vanishing

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

The bird’s breeding areas are now limited to the northern grasslands of the north, from the Kimberley in the west to Cape York Peninsula on Queensland’s top end.

“While that region is mostly intact, it has its own issues,” says MacColl, who has been researching the bird for seven years.

“I worry about climate change and especially the immense heat and thermal threat risk for the young birds. Then there’s the continuing risk of habitat loss from agriculture, forestry, and resource extraction.”

GPS monitoring has revealed that some juveniles undertake a dangerous 1,500km flight south to central Australia for about eight months—perhaps honing their skills—before returning for good to their coastal boltholes.

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

“They look for the highest perch in the tallest stand, and those wooded areas are increasingly rare any more,” he says.

The Red Goshawk ‘Glare’

Red goshawks can be difficult to see and have vast territories—possibly as big as 600 square kilometers—and would traditionally 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 fly away if a human approaches, alerting anyone looking 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 another ten on the Tiwi archipelago (the biggest landmass in the group, Melville, is now regarded as the red goshawk’s stronghold).

A conservation group has been training Indigenous rangers and traditional owners 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 breeding and get a clearer picture on the actual numbers of red goshawks.

Tiwi islander Chris Brogan is a fire management worker for Plantation Management Partners on Melville Island and is part of a team that checks on the birds, watching activity at nests over 30-minute periods.

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

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

Preventing Disappearance

MacColl was working as an environmental scientist for Rio Tinto about a ten years back when he initially spotted a red goshawk nest in western Cape York.

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

Red goshawks are in a genus 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 ground to collect a stick will return to a perch 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 raptor in Australia—they’re on their unique limb of the evolutionary tree.

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