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Nesting in the tallest tree, typically near a waterway, the scarlet raptor 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 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 species found only in Australia—is vanishing from the Australian landscape.

“It’s vanished throughout eastern Australia, unnoticed by many,” explains a researcher from the Queensland University and a bird conservation group.

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

Although the bird being first described in 1801, it was rarely seen and, until recently, relatively little was known about the behavior of Australia’s rarest bird of prey. Many enthusiasts have never seen one.

Now, researchers like MacColl are in a race to understand how many of these birds are left so they can refine conservation plans.

Dr Richard Seaton, a senior conservationist at BirdLife Australia, devoted time searching for them in southeast QLD in 2013—revisiting sites where they had been recorded just a decade and a half before.

“I didn’t spot any anywhere. So we started a conservation group,” he says. “At the time, we were unaware of their territory, what habitats they needed, or really what they were up to or where they were going.”

The species was present as far south as Sydney in the past. In the 1700s, a convict artist named Thomas Watling sketched the bird from a specimen attached to the side of a settler’s hut in Botany Bay.

That illustration—now stored in Britain’s Natural History Museum—found its way to English bird expert John Latham, who used it to formally describe the red goshawk in 1801.

Closer to Extinction

In 2023, the federal government changed the status of the red goshawk from vulnerable to critically threatened—labeling it as closer to extinction—and estimated there were just about 1,300 adults left in the wild. MacColl thinks the true count could be under a thousand.

The bird’s nesting sites are now restricted to the northern grasslands of the north, from the Kimberley region in the west to Cape York Peninsula on Queensland’s top end.

“While that area is largely undisturbed, it has its own issues,” says MacColl, who has been researching the bird for seven years.

“I am concerned about climate change and particularly the immense heat and thermal threat risk for the young birds. Then there’s the ongoing threat of habitat loss from farming, forestry, and mining.”

Satellite tracking has revealed that some juveniles take a risky 1,500km flight south to the Australian interior for about most of the year—perhaps learning how to hunt—before returning for good to their seaside homes.

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

“They seek out the highest perch in the largest grove, and those stands of trees are increasingly rare any more,” he says.

The Red Goshawk ‘Stare’

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

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 stare at you.”

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

BirdLife Australia has been educating local guardians and traditional owners in the north to identify the birds and observe behavior in their wide nests—built out of thick sticks on level limbs—to see how successful they are at breeding and get a better handle 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, watching activity at nests over half-hour intervals.

“They’re beautiful, but they can be hard to spot because their colors blend in with the trunks of the trees,” he comments.

“When I began, I assumed they were just another bird. 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 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 one other known member—PNG’s brown-shouldered raptor.

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

“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 own branch of the evolutionary tree.

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