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Nesting in the highest branches, often near a waterway, the red goshawk pursues prey under the canopy—targeting swift prey like the colorful parrot and snatching them from the air.

The gentle hum of their strong, expansive, wide-spanning wings can be heard from below as they gain speed, before quietly diving and turning 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,” states Chris MacColl from the University of Queensland and a bird conservation group.

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

Despite the bird being first described in 1801, it was rarely seen and, until recently, not much was known about the behavior of Australia’s most uncommon raptor. Many enthusiasts 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.

A bird expert, the director of terrestrial birds at BirdLife Australia, spent months looking for them in southeast QLD in 2013—returning to locations 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 notes. “At the time, we didn’t know their home range, what habitats they needed, or truly 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 imprisoned painter named Thomas Watling sketched the bird from a sample nailed to the side of a pioneer’s home 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 classification of the red goshawk from vulnerable to critically threatened—assessing it as nearer to dying out—and calculated there were just about 1,300 adults left in the wild. MacColl believes the actual number could be below 1,000.

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

“While that area is mostly intact, it has its own issues,” says MacColl, who has been studying the bird for almost a decade.

“I am concerned about global warming and especially the immense heat and thermal threat risk for the young birds. Then there’s the continuing risk of environmental destruction from farming, logging, and mining.”

Satellite tracking has revealed that some juveniles take a risky 1,500-kilometer flight south to central Australia for about eight months—possibly honing their skills—before returning for good to their coastal boltholes.

The reason the species has suffered such a swift decline in its range isn’t clear, but Seaton says fragmentation of habitat is probably the cause.

“They look for the tallest tree in the largest grove, and those wooded areas aren’t that common any more,” he says.

The Red Goshawk ‘Glare’

Red goshawks can be hard to spot and have huge home ranges—perhaps as big as 600 sq km—and would traditionally have always been sparsely distributed around the landscape, while staying close to shorelines and rivers.

They are not noisy, and Seaton says while many raptors will fly away if a human gets close, signaling anyone searching for them, a red goshawk “will just glare at you.”

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

BirdLife Australia has been training Indigenous rangers and native custodians in the north to identify the birds and monitor activity in their metre-wide nests—constructed out of sturdy branches on level limbs—to see how effective they are at breeding and get a clearer picture on the actual numbers of red goshawks.

Local resident Chris Brogan is a fire management worker for a forestry company on Melville Island and is part of a team that checks on the birds, observing 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 comments.

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

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 says.

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

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

“There really is nothing like them,” says MacColl. “They’re not directly linked to any other bird of prey in Australia—they’re on their unique limb of the family tree.

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