🔗 Share this article

Perched in the highest branches, typically near a creek, the red goshawk pursues prey under the canopy—chasing down swift prey like the rainbow lorikeet and snatching them from the air.

The soft thrum of their deep, powerful, metre-wide wings is audible from below as they accelerate, before quietly diving and turning like a feathered fighter jet.

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

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

“It was still frequently seen in northern NSW and southeast QLD until the 2000s, but after that, the records have dropped off. It has vanished from known areas.”

Despite 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. Most birdwatchers have never seen one.

Currently, researchers like MacColl are working urgently to determine how many of these birds remain so they can refine efforts to save them.

A bird expert, a senior conservationist at a leading bird organization, spent months searching for them in southeast QLD in 2013—returning to sites 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 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 sketched the bird from a specimen nailed to the side of a pioneer’s home in Botany Bay.

That drawing—now stored in a UK museum—found its way to English bird expert John Latham, who used it to formally describe the red goshawk in 1801.

Closer to Extinction

In 2023, the national authorities updated the status of the red goshawk from vulnerable to endangered—labeling it as nearer to dying out—and estimated there were just 1,300 adults left in the wild. MacColl thinks the actual number could be below 1,000.

The bird’s nesting sites are now restricted to the northern grasslands of the north, from the Kimberley in the west to Cape York on Queensland’s northern tip.

“While that region is mostly intact, 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 overheating dangers for the young birds. Then there’s the ongoing threat of environmental destruction from agriculture, forestry, and resource extraction.”

GPS monitoring has shown that some young birds take a risky 1,500-kilometer flight south to the Australian interior for about eight months—possibly honing their skills—before returning 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 fragmentation of habitat is probably the cause.

“They seek out the tallest tree in the tallest stand, and those stands of trees aren’t that common any more,” he says.

The Red Goshawk ‘Glare’

Red goshawks can be difficult to see 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 waterways.

They are not noisy, and Seaton says while most large birds will flee if a human gets close, signaling 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 reports, with 10 more on the Tiwi Islands (the biggest landmass in the group, Melville, is now considered the red goshawk’s main habitat).

A conservation group has been educating local guardians and native custodians in the north to identify the birds and observe behavior in their wide nests—built out of thick sticks on level limbs—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 a forestry company 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 blend in with the trunks of the trees,” he comments.

“When I started, 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 western Cape York.

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

Red goshawks are in a genus of bird that has only a single relative—Papua New Guinea’s brown-shouldered raptor.

Their strength impresses him. A red goshawk that goes to the forest floor to collect a stick will fly back to a branch high above “vertically,” he says. “They go directly upward.”

“There truly is no other bird like it,” says MacColl. “They’re not directly linked to any other raptor in Australia—they’re on their unique limb 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 save the species.”