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Nesting in the tallest tree, often near a creek, the red goshawk hunts beneath the canopy—chasing down swift prey like the colorful parrot and snatching them mid-flight.

The gentle hum of their deep, powerful, wide-spanning wings is audible from below as they gain speed, before silently swooping and turning like a feathered fighter jet.

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

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

“It was regularly spotted in northern NSW and southeast QLD up to the 2000s, but since then, the records have dropped off. It has vanished from known areas.”

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

Currently, researchers like MacColl are in a race to determine how many of these birds are left so they can improve conservation plans.

A bird expert, the director of terrestrial birds at a leading bird organization, devoted time looking for them in southeast QLD in 2013—returning to sites where they had been observed just a decade and a half before.

“I couldn’t find them anywhere. So we formed a recovery team,” he says. “At the time, we didn’t know their home range, 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 convict artist named Thomas Watling sketched the bird from a sample nailed 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.

Closer to Extinction

In 2023, the national authorities changed the status of the red goshawk from at risk to endangered—assessing it as closer to extinction—and estimated there were just 1,300 adults left in the wild. MacColl thinks the actual number could be below 1,000.

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

“While that region is largely undisturbed, it has its own issues,” says MacColl, who has been researching the bird for almost a decade.

“I worry about climate change and particularly the extreme temperatures and overheating dangers for the juveniles. Then there’s the ongoing threat of habitat loss from agriculture, logging, and resource extraction.”

GPS monitoring has revealed that some juveniles take a risky 1,500-kilometer flight south to the Australian interior for about most of the year—possibly honing their skills—before coming back for good to their seaside homes.

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

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

The Red Goshawk ‘Stare’

Red goshawks can be hard to spot and have vast territories—perhaps as big as 600 square kilometers—and would traditionally have always been thinly spread around the landscape, while staying close to coastal areas and waterways.

They are not noisy, 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 biggest landmass in the group, Melville, is now regarded as the red goshawk’s main habitat).

BirdLife Australia has been training local guardians and traditional owners in the north to identify the birds and monitor activity in their metre-wide nests—constructed out of sturdy branches on horizontal branches—to see how successful they are at reproducing and get a better handle 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 half-hour intervals.

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

“When I started, I assumed they were just common. I thought they were widespread. 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 completely captivated ever since,” he says.

Red goshawks are in a genus of bird that has only a single relative—Papua New Guinea’s brown-shouldered raptor.

Their power impresses him. A red goshawk that goes to the forest floor to grab a stick will return to a perch 30 metres up “vertically,” he says. “They go directly upward.”

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

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