🔗 Share this article

Perched in the tallest tree, typically near a waterway, the scarlet raptor hunts beneath the canopy—targeting swift prey like the rainbow lorikeet and snatching them mid-flight.

The gentle hum of their strong, expansive, metre-wide wings can be heard from below as they accelerate, then silently swooping and turning like a feathered fighter jet.

Yet the spectacle of the red goshawk—a species found nowhere else on Earth—is vanishing from the Australian landscape.

“It’s vanished throughout eastern Australia, right under our noses,” explains Chris MacColl from the Queensland University and BirdLife Australia.

“It was regularly spotted in northern New South Wales and south-east Queensland up to the 2000s, but since then, the sightings completely disappear. It has fallen off the map.”

Although the bird being initially documented in 1801, it was rarely seen and, until modern times, not much was known about the habits of Australia’s most uncommon raptor. Most birdwatchers have never seen one.

Now, scientists like MacColl are working urgently to determine the number of these birds remain so they can improve efforts to save them.

A bird expert, the director of terrestrial birds at a leading bird organization, spent months looking for them in southeast QLD in 2013—returning to locations where they had been recorded just 15 years earlier.

“I didn’t spot any anywhere. So we started a recovery team,” he says. “At the time, we were unaware of their home range, what habitats they required, or really what they were doing or where they were going.”

The bird 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 settler’s hut in Botany Bay.

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

Closer to Extinction

In 2023, the federal government updated the classification of the red goshawk from at risk to endangered—assessing it as nearer to dying out—and estimated there were just about 1,300 adults left in the wild. MacColl thinks the actual number could be below 1,000.

The bird’s breeding areas 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 problems,” says MacColl, who has been researching the bird for seven years.

“I worry about global warming and particularly the immense heat and thermal threat risk for the young birds. Then there’s the continuing risk of environmental destruction from farming, forestry, and mining.”

Satellite tracking has shown that some juveniles take a risky 1,500-kilometer flight south to the Australian interior for about eight months—possibly learning how to hunt—before returning for good to their seaside homes.

Just why the species has experienced such a swift decline in its territory isn’t certain, but Seaton says broken-up environments 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 explains.

The Red Goshawk ‘Glare’

Red goshawks can be hard to spot and have vast territories—perhaps as big as 600 square kilometers—and would historically have always been sparsely distributed around the landscape, while hugging coastal areas and waterways.

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 glare at you.”

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

A conservation group has been training Indigenous rangers and native custodians in the north to spot the birds and monitor activity in their metre-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 firefighter for Plantation Management Partners on Melville Island and is part of a team that monitors the birds, watching activity at nests over 30-minute periods.

“They’re beautiful, but they can be tricky to see because their colors merge with the trunks of the trees,” he says.

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

Averting Extinction

MacColl was working as an environmental scientist for a mining firm 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 says.

Red goshawks are in a category of bird that has only one other known member—Papua New Guinea’s brown-shouldered raptor.

Their strength impresses him. A red goshawk that heads to the forest floor to collect a stick will return to a perch high above “vertically,” he says. “They go straight up.”

“There really is nothing like them,” says MacColl. “They’re not closely related to any other raptor in Australia—they’re on their own branch of the evolutionary tree.

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