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Nesting in the highest branches, typically near a waterway, the scarlet raptor hunts beneath the canopy—chasing down speed demons like the colorful parrot and plucking them mid-flight.

The gentle hum of their strong, expansive, metre-wide wings is audible from below as they gain speed, then quietly diving and banking like a feathered fighter jet.

Yet the sight of the red goshawk—a bird found nowhere else on Earth—is vanishing from the continent’s terrain.

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

“It was still frequently seen in northern NSW and southeast QLD up to the 2000s, but after that, the sightings completely disappear. It has vanished from known areas.”

Although the bird being first described in 1801, it was rarely seen and, until recently, not much was known about the habits of Australia’s most uncommon raptor. Most birdwatchers have never seen one.

Currently, researchers like MacColl are in a race to determine the number of these birds are left so they can improve efforts to save them.

A bird expert, the director of terrestrial birds at a leading bird organization, spent months searching for them in south-east Queensland in 2013—returning to locations where they had been observed just a decade and a half before.

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

The bird was present 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 attached to the side of a settler’s hut in Botany Bay.

That illustration—now housed in Britain’s Natural History Museum—was passed to British ornithologist John Latham, who used it to formally describe the red goshawk in 1801.

Nearer to Vanishing

In 2023, the national authorities 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 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 Peninsula on Queensland’s top end.

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

“I am concerned about global warming and especially the extreme temperatures and thermal threat risk for the young birds. Then there’s the continuing risk of environmental destruction from agriculture, forestry, and resource extraction.”

Satellite tracking has revealed that some young birds undertake a dangerous 1,500km flight south to central Australia for about eight months—possibly learning how to hunt—before coming back for good to their coastal boltholes.

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

“They look for the highest perch in the tallest stand, and those wooded areas aren’t that common any more,” he says.

The Red Goshawk ‘Stare’

Red goshawks can be difficult to see and have vast territories—perhaps as big as 600 square kilometers—and would historically have always been thinly spread around the landscape, while staying close to coastal areas and waterways.

They are quiet birds, and Seaton says while many raptors will fly away if a human gets close, signaling anyone looking for them, a red goshawk “will just glare at you.”

There were only ten recorded pairs on the Australian mainland this year, Seaton reports, with another ten on the Tiwi Islands (the biggest landmass in the group, Melville, is now considered the red goshawk’s stronghold).

BirdLife Australia has been training local guardians and traditional owners in the north to identify the birds and observe behavior in their wide nests—constructed out of sturdy branches on horizontal branches—to see how effective they are at breeding and get a clearer picture on the true population of red goshawks.

Local resident Chris Brogan is a firefighter 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 hard to spot because their colors merge with the tree bark,” he says.

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

Averting Extinction

MacColl was working as an ecology expert for a mining firm about a decade ago when he initially spotted a red goshawk nest in western Cape York.

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

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

Their strength amazes him. A red goshawk that goes to the forest floor to collect a stick will fly back to a branch high above “vertically,” he says. “They go directly upward.”

“There really is no other bird like it,” 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 collaboration of experts united—and the best information possible to know what they need. That’s how we avert extinction.”