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Nesting in the highest branches, typically near a creek, the red goshawk pursues prey under the canopy—chasing down speed demons like the colorful parrot and snatching them mid-flight.

The gentle hum of their deep, powerful, metre-wide wings is audible from below as they accelerate, then silently swooping and banking like a avian aircraft.

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, right under our noses,” states a researcher from the Queensland University and BirdLife Australia.

“It was still frequently seen in northern NSW and south-east Queensland 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 never a common sight and, until modern times, relatively little was known about the behavior of Australia’s rarest bird of prey. Many enthusiasts have never seen one.

Now, scientists like MacColl are working urgently to understand how many of these birds are left so they can refine efforts to save them.

Dr Richard Seaton, the director of terrestrial birds at BirdLife Australia, spent months looking for them in southeast QLD in 2013—returning to sites where they had been recorded just 15 years earlier.

“I didn’t spot any anywhere. So we formed a conservation group,” he notes. “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 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 English bird expert John Latham, who used it to officially name the red goshawk in 1801.

Closer to Extinction

In 2023, the national authorities changed the classification of the red goshawk from at risk to critically threatened—labeling it as nearer to dying out—and estimated there were just about 1,300 adults left in the wild. MacColl believes the true count could be below 1,000.

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

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

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

Satellite tracking has revealed that some young birds undertake a dangerous 1,500km flight south to the Australian interior for about most of the year—perhaps 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 likely to blame.

“They look for the tallest tree in the tallest stand, and those stands of trees are increasingly rare any more,” he explains.

The Red Goshawk ‘Stare’

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 hugging coastal areas and rivers.

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

There were only ten recorded pairs on the Australian mainland this year, Seaton reports, with another ten on the Tiwi Islands (the largest island 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 reproducing and get a clearer picture on the actual numbers of red goshawks.

Local resident Chris Brogan is a firefighter for Plantation Management Partners on Melville Island and is part of a team that monitors the birds, observing activity at nests over 30-minute periods.

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

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

Averting Extinction

MacColl was working as an ecology expert for Rio Tinto about a decade ago when he initially spotted a red goshawk nest in Cape York’s west.

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

Red goshawks are in a genus of bird that has only one other known member—Papua New Guinea’s chestnut-shouldered goshawk.

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

“There truly is no other bird like it,” says MacColl. “They’re not directly linked to any other bird of prey in Australia—they’re on their unique limb of the evolutionary tree.

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