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Perched in the tallest tree, often near a waterway, the red goshawk hunts beneath the canopy—targeting swift prey like the rainbow lorikeet and plucking them from the air.

The gentle hum of their deep, powerful, wide-spanning wings can be heard 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 only in Australia—is vanishing from the continent’s terrain.

“It’s gone extinct throughout eastern Australia, unnoticed by many,” states Chris MacColl from the University of Queensland and BirdLife Australia.

“It was still frequently seen in northern NSW and southeast QLD up to 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 habits of Australia’s most uncommon raptor. Many enthusiasts have yet to spot it.

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

Dr Richard Seaton, a senior conservationist at a leading bird organization, devoted time looking for them in southeast QLD in 2013—returning to sites where they had been recorded just a decade and a half before.

“I didn’t spot any anywhere. So we started a recovery team,” he says. “At the time, we didn’t know their territory, what habitats they needed, or really what they were doing or where they were traveling.”

The species was present as far south as Sydney in the past. In the 1700s, a imprisoned painter named Thomas Watling sketched the bird from a sample attached to the side of a pioneer’s home in Botany Bay.

That drawing—now housed in a UK museum—found its way to English bird expert John Latham, who used it to formally describe the red goshawk in 1801.

Nearer to Vanishing

In 2023, the federal government updated the status of the red goshawk from vulnerable to critically threatened—assessing it as closer to extinction—and estimated there were just 1,300 mature birds left in the wild. MacColl believes the true count could be below 1,000.

The bird’s nesting sites are now limited 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 mostly intact, it has its own problems,” says MacColl, who has been researching the bird for almost a decade.

“I am concerned about global warming and especially the immense heat and overheating dangers for the juveniles. Then there’s the continuing risk of habitat loss from farming, logging, and mining.”

Satellite tracking has revealed that some juveniles take a dangerous 1,500-kilometer flight south to central Australia for about most of the year—possibly learning how to hunt—before coming back for good to their seaside homes.

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

“They seek out the tallest tree in the tallest stand, 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 vast territories—possibly as big as 600 square kilometers—and would traditionally have always been thinly spread around the landscape, while hugging shorelines and waterways.

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 continent this year, Seaton says, with another ten on the Tiwi archipelago (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 spot the birds and monitor activity in their wide nests—built out of sturdy branches on level limbs—to see how effective they are at reproducing and get a clearer picture on the true population 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 plumage merge with the tree bark,” he says.

“When I began, I thought 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 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 completely captivated ever since,” he admits.

Red goshawks are in a genus of bird that has only one other known member—PNG’s brown-shouldered raptor.

Their power impresses him. A red goshawk that goes to the ground to grab a stick will fly back to a perch high above “vertically,” he says. “They go directly upward.”

“There really 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 evolutionary tree.

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