🔗 Share this article

Nesting in the highest branches, often near a creek, the red goshawk pursues prey under the canopy—targeting speed demons like the rainbow lorikeet and plucking them mid-flight.

The soft thrum of their strong, expansive, wide-spanning wings is audible from below as they gain speed, before silently swooping and banking like a feathered fighter jet.

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

“It’s gone extinct all across eastern Australia, unnoticed by many,” states a researcher from the University of Queensland and a bird conservation group.

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

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

Currently, researchers like MacColl are working urgently to determine how many of these birds remain so they can improve conservation plans.

A bird expert, 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 recorded just 15 years earlier.

“I didn’t spot any anywhere. So we started a recovery team,” he notes. “At the time, we didn’t know their home range, what habitats they needed, or truly what they were doing or where they were going.”

The bird was present as far south as Sydney in the past. In the 1700s, a convict artist named Thomas Watling sketched the bird from a specimen attached to the side of a settler’s hut in Botany Bay.

That illustration—now stored in Britain’s Natural History Museum—found its way 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 changed the status of the red goshawk from at risk to critically threatened—assessing it as nearer to dying out—and calculated there were just 1,300 adults left in the wild. MacColl believes 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 region in the west to Cape York Peninsula on Queensland’s northern tip.

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

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

GPS monitoring has revealed that some young birds take a dangerous 1,500km flight south to central Australia 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 probably the cause.

“They look for the highest perch in the tallest stand, and those wooded areas aren’t that common any more,” he explains.

The Red Goshawk ‘Glare’

Red goshawks can be difficult to see and have huge home ranges—possibly as big as 600 sq km—and would historically have always been thinly spread around the landscape, while staying close to shorelines and rivers.

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

There were only 10 known breeding pairs on the Australian mainland this year, Seaton reports, 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 Indigenous rangers and traditional owners in the north to identify the birds and observe behavior in their wide nests—constructed out of sturdy branches on level limbs—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 checks on the birds, watching activity at nests over 30-minute periods.

“They’re stunning, but they can be hard to spot because their colors merge with the tree bark,” he says.

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

Preventing Disappearance

MacColl was working as an ecology expert 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 genus of bird that has only a single relative—PNG’s brown-shouldered raptor.

Their strength amazes him. A red goshawk that goes to the forest floor to grab a stick will fly back to a branch 30 metres up “vertically,” he says. “They go straight up.”

“There really is nothing like them,” says MacColl. “They’re not directly linked to any other bird of prey in Australia—they’re on their unique limb of the evolutionary tree.

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