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Perched in the tallest tree, often near a creek, the scarlet raptor pursues prey under the canopy—targeting speed demons like the rainbow lorikeet and snatching them mid-flight.

The soft thrum of their strong, expansive, metre-wide wings is audible from below as they gain speed, before silently swooping 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 all across eastern Australia, right under our noses,” explains a researcher from the Queensland University and BirdLife Australia.

“It was still frequently seen in northern NSW and southeast QLD until the 2000s, but after that, the records have dropped off. It has fallen off the map.”

Although the bird being initially documented in 1801, it was never a common sight and, until modern times, not much was known about the habits of Australia’s rarest bird of prey. Many enthusiasts have never seen one.

Now, researchers like MacColl are working urgently to determine the number of these birds remain so they can improve conservation plans.

Dr Richard Seaton, the director of terrestrial birds at a leading bird organization, spent months searching for them in southeast QLD in 2013—returning to locations where they had been recorded just 15 years earlier.

“I couldn’t find them anywhere. So we started a recovery team,” he says. “At the time, we were unaware of their territory, what habitats they needed, or really what they were doing or where they were going.”

The species was present as far south as Sydney in the past. In the late 18th century, a imprisoned painter named Thomas Watling sketched the bird from a specimen attached to the side of a settler’s hut in Botany Bay.

That drawing—now stored in Britain’s Natural History Museum—found its way to British ornithologist John Latham, who used it to officially name the red goshawk in 1801.

Closer to Extinction

In 2023, the national authorities updated the status of the red goshawk from at risk 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 actual number could be below 1,000.

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

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

“I am concerned about global warming and especially the extreme temperatures and overheating dangers for the juveniles. Then there’s the ongoing threat of environmental destruction from farming, forestry, and mining.”

GPS monitoring has revealed that some juveniles undertake a risky 1,500km flight south to the Australian interior for about eight months—possibly learning how to hunt—before coming back for good to their seaside homes.

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

“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 hard to spot and have huge home ranges—possibly as big as 600 square kilometers—and would historically have always been sparsely distributed 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 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 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 local guardians and native custodians in the north to spot the birds and observe behavior in their metre-wide nests—built out of sturdy branches on horizontal branches—to see how successful they are at reproducing and get a clearer picture on the actual numbers of red goshawks.

Tiwi islander Chris Brogan is a firefighter for a forestry company on Melville Island and is part of a team that checks on the birds, watching activity at nests over 30-minute periods.

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

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

Preventing Disappearance

MacColl was working as an environmental scientist for Rio Tinto about a decade ago 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 a single relative—Papua New Guinea’s chestnut-shouldered goshawk.

Their power impresses him. A red goshawk that heads to the ground to collect a stick will return to a perch high above “straight up,” he says. “They go straight up.”

“There truly is nothing like them,” says MacColl. “They’re not closely related to any other bird of prey in Australia—they’re on their own branch of the family tree.

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