Heading Towards Extinction ‘Right Under Our Noses’: The Silent Plight of Australia’s Most Elusive Raptor

Perched in the highest branches, often near a creek, the red goshawk hunts beneath the canopy—targeting speed demons like the rainbow lorikeet and snatching them from the air.

The gentle hum of their deep, powerful, wide-spanning wings is audible from below as they gain speed, before silently swooping and turning like a avian aircraft.

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,” states a researcher from the Queensland University and BirdLife Australia.

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

Despite the bird being initially documented in 1801, it was rarely seen and, until recently, relatively little was known about the behavior of Australia’s rarest bird of prey. Many enthusiasts have yet to spot it.

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

Dr Richard Seaton, a senior conservationist at BirdLife Australia, spent months looking 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 formed a recovery team,” he says. “At the time, we didn’t know their home range, what habitats they needed, or really what they were doing or where they were going.”

The species certainly existed as far south as Sydney in the past. In the late 18th century, a convict artist named Thomas Watling drew the bird from a sample nailed to the side of a settler’s hut in Botany Bay.

That drawing—now housed in a UK 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 classification of the red goshawk from vulnerable to critically threatened—assessing it as closer to extinction—and calculated there were just about 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 restricted to the northern grasslands of the north, from the Kimberley in the west to Cape York Peninsula on Queensland’s northern tip.

“While that area 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 particularly the extreme temperatures and thermal threat risk for the juveniles. Then there’s the ongoing threat of environmental destruction from farming, logging, and mining.”

GPS monitoring has revealed that some young birds take a risky 1,500-kilometer flight south to the Australian interior for about most of the year—perhaps learning how to hunt—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 broken-up environments is likely to blame.

“They look for the highest perch in the largest grove, and those stands of trees aren’t that common any more,” he explains.

The Red Goshawk ‘Glare’

Red goshawks can be difficult to see and have huge home ranges—perhaps as big as 600 sq km—and would historically have always been thinly spread around the landscape, while hugging coastal areas and rivers.

They are quiet birds, and Seaton says while many raptors will fly away if a human gets close, signaling anyone searching for them, a red goshawk “will just stare at you.”

There were only 10 known breeding pairs on the Australian mainland this year, Seaton says, with another ten 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 monitor activity in their wide nests—constructed out of thick sticks on level limbs—to see how effective they are at reproducing and get a clearer picture 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, observing activity at nests over half-hour intervals.

“They’re stunning, but they can be tricky to see because their colors blend in with the trunks of the trees,” he comments.

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

Preventing Disappearance

MacColl was working as an ecology expert for Rio Tinto about a decade ago when he first saw 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—Papua New Guinea’s chestnut-shouldered goshawk.

Their power amazes him. A red goshawk that goes to the ground to collect a stick will fly back to a perch 30 metres up “straight up,” 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 evolutionary tree.

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