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Perched in the tallest tree, often near a creek, the scarlet raptor hunts beneath the canopy—targeting speed demons like the colorful parrot and snatching them from the air.

The gentle hum of their deep, powerful, wide-spanning 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 species found only in Australia—is disappearing from the continent’s terrain.

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

“It was still frequently seen in northern New South Wales and southeast QLD until the 2000s, but since then, the sightings completely disappear. It has vanished from known areas.”

Although the bird being first described in 1801, it was never a common sight and, until recently, relatively little was known about the habits of Australia’s most uncommon raptor. Many enthusiasts have never seen one.

Now, scientists like MacColl are in a race to determine the number of these birds are left so they can improve efforts to save them.

A bird expert, a senior conservationist at BirdLife Australia, spent months looking for them in southeast QLD in 2013—revisiting locations where they had been recorded just 15 years earlier.

“I couldn’t find them anywhere. So we started a recovery team,” he says. “At the time, we were unaware of their territory, what environments 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 imprisoned painter named Thomas Watling sketched the bird from a sample nailed to the side of a pioneer’s home in Botany Bay.

That illustration—now housed in a UK museum—found its way to British ornithologist John Latham, who used it to officially name the red goshawk in 1801.

Nearer to Vanishing

In 2023, the federal government updated the classification of the red goshawk from at risk to critically threatened—assessing it as closer to extinction—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 nesting sites are now limited to the northern grasslands of the north, from the Kimberley in the west to Cape York Peninsula on Queensland’s top end.

“While that region is mostly intact, it has its own issues,” says MacColl, who has been studying the bird for seven years.

“I am concerned about global warming and especially the immense heat and overheating dangers for the young birds. Then there’s the ongoing threat of environmental destruction from farming, logging, and resource extraction.”

Satellite tracking has shown that some young birds undertake a dangerous 1,500km flight south to the Australian interior for about most of the year—possibly honing their skills—before returning for good to their seaside homes.

The reason the species has suffered such a rapid collapse in its range isn’t clear, but Seaton says fragmentation of habitat is probably the cause.

“They seek out the tallest tree in the tallest stand, and those wooded areas aren’t that common any more,” he explains.

The Red Goshawk ‘Glare’

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

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 glare at you.”

There were only 10 known breeding pairs on the Australian mainland this year, Seaton says, with 10 more on the Tiwi archipelago (the biggest landmass in the group, Melville, is now considered the red goshawk’s stronghold).

A conservation group has been training Indigenous rangers and native custodians in the north to identify the birds and monitor activity in their metre-wide nests—built out of thick sticks on horizontal branches—to see how effective they are at breeding and get a better handle on the actual numbers of red goshawks.

Tiwi islander Chris Brogan is a fire management worker 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 stunning, but they can be hard to spot because their plumage merge with the tree bark,” he says.

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

Averting Extinction

MacColl was working as an environmental scientist for Rio Tinto about a ten years back when he initially spotted a red goshawk nest in Cape York’s west.

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

Red goshawks are in a category of bird that has only a single relative—Papua New Guinea’s chestnut-shouldered goshawk.

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

“There truly 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 family tree.

“We are going to need a network of experts together—and the best information possible to know what they need. That’s how we avert extinction.”