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Perched in the highest branches, typically near a waterway, the red goshawk hunts beneath the canopy—chasing down swift prey like the colorful parrot and snatching them from the air.

The soft thrum of their deep, powerful, metre-wide wings can be heard from below as they accelerate, before silently swooping and turning like a avian aircraft.

Yet the sight of the red goshawk—a bird found only in Australia—is vanishing from the Australian landscape.

“It’s vanished all across eastern Australia, right under our noses,” states a researcher from the Queensland University and a bird conservation group.

“It was regularly spotted in northern NSW and south-east Queensland up to the 2000s, but after that, the sightings have dropped off. 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 habits 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 remain so they can improve conservation plans.

Dr Richard Seaton, a senior conservationist at BirdLife Australia, spent months looking 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 formed a conservation group,” he notes. “At the time, we didn’t know their home range, what environments they required, or truly what they were up to 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 specimen attached to the side of a pioneer’s home in Botany Bay.

That illustration—now stored in Britain’s Natural History Museum—was passed 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 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 limited to the northern grasslands of the north, from the Kimberley in the west to Cape York Peninsula on Queensland’s northern tip.

“While that region is mostly intact, it has its own issues,” says MacColl, who has been researching the bird for seven years.

“I am concerned about global warming and particularly the immense heat and overheating dangers for the young birds. Then there’s the continuing risk of habitat loss from agriculture, logging, and resource extraction.”

Satellite tracking has shown that some young birds take a dangerous 1,500km flight south to the Australian interior for about eight months—possibly honing their skills—before coming back for good to their coastal boltholes.

Just why the species has experienced such a rapid collapse in its range isn’t certain, but Seaton says fragmentation of habitat is likely to blame.

“They look for the highest perch in the largest grove, and those stands of trees aren’t that common any more,” he explains.

The Red Goshawk ‘Stare’

Red goshawks can be difficult to see and have vast territories—perhaps as big as 600 square kilometers—and would historically have always been thinly spread around the landscape, while hugging coastal areas and rivers.

They are quiet birds, and Seaton says while most large birds will fly away if a human gets close, alerting anyone looking for them, a red goshawk “will just stare at you.”

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

A conservation group has been educating local guardians and traditional owners in the north to spot 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 clearer picture on the true population of red goshawks.

Tiwi islander 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 half-hour intervals.

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

“When I started, 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 environmental scientist for a mining firm about a decade ago when he initially spotted a red goshawk nest in western Cape York.

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

Red goshawks are in a category 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 forest floor to collect a stick will fly back to a branch 30 metres up “vertically,” he says. “They go straight up.”

“There really is no other bird like it,” says MacColl. “They’re not closely related to any other raptor in Australia—they’re on their unique limb of the family 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 avert extinction.”