Going Towards Extinction ‘Right Under Our Noses’: The Silent Plight of the Nation’s Rarest Raptor

Perched in the tallest tree, typically near a waterway, the red goshawk hunts beneath the canopy—targeting speed demons like the colorful parrot and snatching them mid-flight.

The gentle hum of their strong, expansive, wide-spanning wings can be heard from below as they accelerate, then quietly diving and banking 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, right under our noses,” explains a researcher from the Queensland University and BirdLife Australia.

“It was still frequently seen in northern NSW and south-east Queensland until the 2000s, but since then, the sightings completely disappear. It has vanished from known areas.”

Although the bird being initially documented in 1801, it was never a common sight and, until recently, not much was known about the behavior of Australia’s most uncommon raptor. Many enthusiasts have yet to spot it.

Now, researchers like MacColl are in a race to determine how many of these birds remain so they can improve conservation plans.

Dr Richard Seaton, the director of terrestrial birds at a leading bird organization, spent months looking for them in south-east Queensland in 2013—returning to locations where they had been observed just a decade and a half before.

“I didn’t spot any anywhere. So we formed a conservation group,” 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 bird was present as far south as Sydney in the past. In the late 18th century, a convict artist named Thomas Watling sketched the bird from a specimen nailed to the side of a pioneer’s home in Botany Bay.

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

Closer to Extinction

In 2023, the federal government updated the classification of the red goshawk from vulnerable to endangered—labeling it as nearer to dying out—and calculated there were just about 1,300 adults left in the wild. MacColl believes the true count could be under a thousand.

The bird’s nesting sites are now limited to the tropical savannas of the north, from the Kimberley region in the west to Cape York on Queensland’s top end.

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

“I am concerned about climate change and especially the immense heat and overheating dangers for the young birds. Then there’s the continuing risk of habitat loss from agriculture, logging, and resource extraction.”

Satellite tracking has shown that some juveniles take a risky 1,500-kilometer flight south to the Australian interior for about most of the year—perhaps honing their skills—before returning for good to their coastal boltholes.

Just why the species has suffered such a rapid collapse in its territory isn’t clear, but Seaton says broken-up environments is likely to blame.

“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 ‘Stare’

Red goshawks can be difficult to see and have vast territories—possibly as big as 600 sq km—and would traditionally have always been sparsely distributed around the landscape, while staying close to shorelines and waterways.

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

There were only ten recorded pairs on the Australian mainland this year, Seaton says, with 10 more on the Tiwi Islands (the largest island in the group, Melville, is now regarded as the red goshawk’s main habitat).

BirdLife Australia has been training local guardians and native custodians in the north to identify the birds and observe behavior in their wide nests—constructed 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 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 says.

“When I began, I thought they were just common. 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 ten years back 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 category of bird that has only a single relative—Papua New Guinea’s brown-shouldered raptor.

Their strength impresses him. A red goshawk that heads to the forest floor to grab a stick will return to a perch 30 metres up “vertically,” he says. “They go directly upward.”

“There really is no other bird like it,” 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 network of people united—and the best information possible to know what they require. That’s how we avert extinction.”