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Nesting in the tallest tree, often near a creek, the scarlet raptor pursues prey under the canopy—chasing down swift prey like the colorful parrot and snatching them mid-flight.

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

Yet the sight of the red goshawk—a bird found nowhere else on Earth—is disappearing from the continent’s terrain.

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

“It was regularly spotted in northern New South Wales and south-east Queensland until the 2000s, but after that, the sightings have dropped off. It has fallen off the map.”

Although the bird being initially documented in 1801, it was never a common sight and, until recently, not much was known about the behavior of Australia’s rarest bird of prey. Many enthusiasts have never seen one.

Now, researchers like MacColl are in a race to understand the number of these birds are left so they can refine efforts to save them.

A bird expert, the director of terrestrial birds at BirdLife Australia, devoted time searching for them in south-east Queensland in 2013—revisiting sites where they had been recorded just 15 years earlier.

“I didn’t spot any anywhere. So we started a conservation group,” he notes. “At the time, we were unaware of their home range, what environments they required, or truly what they were doing or where they were traveling.”

The bird certainly existed as far south as Sydney in the past. In the late 18th century, a imprisoned painter named Thomas Watling drew 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—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 national authorities updated the classification of the red goshawk from vulnerable to endangered—labeling it as nearer to dying out—and calculated there were just about 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 restricted 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 studying the bird for almost a decade.

“I am concerned about climate change and especially the extreme temperatures and overheating dangers for the young birds. Then there’s the ongoing threat of environmental destruction from agriculture, forestry, and resource extraction.”

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

The reason the species has experienced such a rapid collapse in its range isn’t certain, but Seaton says broken-up environments is likely to blame.

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

The Red Goshawk ‘Glare’

Red goshawks can be hard to spot and have huge home ranges—perhaps as big as 600 square kilometers—and would historically have always been thinly spread around the landscape, while staying close to coastal areas and rivers.

They are quiet birds, and Seaton says while many raptors will flee if a human approaches, alerting anyone searching for them, a red goshawk “will just glare at you.”

There were only ten recorded pairs on the Australian mainland this year, Seaton reports, with 10 more on the Tiwi Islands (the largest island in the group, Melville, is now considered the red goshawk’s main habitat).

BirdLife Australia has been educating Indigenous rangers and native custodians in the north to spot the birds and monitor activity in their wide nests—constructed out of thick sticks on horizontal branches—to see how effective they are at reproducing and get a better handle on the true population of red goshawks.

Tiwi islander Chris Brogan is a firefighter for a forestry company 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 merge with the trunks of the trees,” he comments.

“When I began, I thought they were just common. I believed they were widespread. 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 first saw a red goshawk nest in western Cape York.

“I have been completely captivated ever since,” he says.

Red goshawks are in a category of bird that has only one other known member—PNG’s chestnut-shouldered goshawk.

Their strength amazes him. A red goshawk that goes to the ground to collect a stick will return to a branch high above “straight up,” 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 unique limb of the evolutionary tree.

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