🔗 Share this article

Nesting in the tallest tree, often near a waterway, the red goshawk hunts beneath the canopy—targeting speed demons like the colorful parrot and plucking them from the air.

The gentle hum of their strong, expansive, wide-spanning wings is audible 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 vanished throughout eastern Australia, right under our noses,” states a researcher from the Queensland University and BirdLife Australia.

“It was still frequently seen in northern New South Wales and southeast QLD until 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 modern times, not much was known about the habits of Australia’s rarest bird of prey. Most birdwatchers have never seen one.

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

Dr Richard Seaton, the director of terrestrial birds at a leading bird organization, spent months searching for them in southeast QLD in 2013—revisiting locations where they had been observed just a decade and a half before.

“I couldn’t find them anywhere. So we started a conservation group,” he says. “At the time, we didn’t know their territory, what environments they needed, or truly what they were up to or where they were traveling.”

The bird was present as far south as Sydney in the past. In the late 18th century, a imprisoned painter named Thomas Watling drew 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 British ornithologist John Latham, who used it to formally describe the red goshawk in 1801.

Nearer to Vanishing

In 2023, the federal government changed the classification of the red goshawk from at risk to critically threatened—labeling it as closer to extinction—and estimated there were just 1,300 mature birds left in the wild. MacColl thinks the actual number could be under a thousand.

The bird’s nesting sites are now limited 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 almost a decade.

“I worry about global warming and particularly the immense heat and thermal threat risk for the juveniles. Then there’s the continuing risk of environmental destruction from farming, 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 most of the year—possibly honing their skills—before coming back for good to their seaside homes.

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

“They look for the tallest tree in the largest grove, and those wooded areas aren’t that common any more,” he says.

The Red Goshawk ‘Glare’

Red goshawks can be difficult to see and have huge home ranges—possibly as big as 600 square kilometers—and would traditionally have always been thinly spread around the landscape, while staying close to shorelines and waterways.

They are not noisy, and Seaton says while many raptors will flee if a human gets close, signaling anyone searching for them, a red goshawk “will just stare at you.”

There were only ten recorded pairs on the continent this year, Seaton reports, with another ten on the Tiwi Islands (the largest island in the group, Melville, is now considered the red goshawk’s stronghold).

A conservation group has been training Indigenous rangers and traditional owners in the north to spot the birds and monitor activity in their wide nests—built out of thick sticks on horizontal branches—to see how successful they are at breeding and get a better handle on the true population of red goshawks.

Local resident 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 30-minute periods.

“They’re stunning, but they can be tricky to see because their colors merge with the tree bark,” he comments.

“When I began, I assumed they were just common. I thought they were everywhere. But it’s a bird that’s vanishing.”

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 a single relative—PNG’s chestnut-shouldered goshawk.

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

“There truly 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 family tree.

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