Heading Extinct ‘Unnoticed by Many’: The Quiet Struggle of the Nation’s Rarest Raptor

Perched in the highest branches, often near a waterway, the red goshawk hunts beneath the canopy—chasing down speed demons like the colorful parrot and snatching them from the air.

The soft thrum of their strong, expansive, wide-spanning wings can be heard from below as they gain speed, then silently swooping and turning like a feathered fighter jet.

Yet the sight of the red goshawk—a bird found only in Australia—is disappearing from the continent’s terrain.

“It’s vanished throughout eastern Australia, right under our noses,” explains Chris MacColl from the University of Queensland and BirdLife Australia.

“It was regularly spotted in northern New South Wales and southeast QLD up to the 2000s, but after that, the records have dropped off. It has fallen off the map.”

Although the bird being first described in 1801, it was rarely seen and, until modern times, relatively little was known about the habits of Australia’s rarest bird of prey. Many enthusiasts have yet to spot it.

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

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

“I couldn’t find them anywhere. So we started a conservation group,” he says. “At the time, we were unaware of 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 late 18th century, a convict artist named Thomas Watling drew the bird from a sample attached to the side of a settler’s hut in Botany Bay.

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

Closer to Extinction

In 2023, the federal government updated the status 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 thinks the true count could be below 1,000.

The bird’s breeding areas are now restricted to the tropical savannas of the north, from the Kimberley region in the west to Cape York on Queensland’s northern tip.

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

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

GPS monitoring has shown that some young birds take a dangerous 1,500-kilometer flight south to the Australian interior for about eight months—perhaps honing their skills—before coming back for good to their seaside homes.

Just why the species has suffered such a swift decline in its range isn’t certain, but Seaton says broken-up environments is probably the cause.

“They seek out the highest perch in the tallest stand, and those stands of trees are increasingly rare any more,” he says.

The Red Goshawk ‘Stare’

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

They are quiet birds, and Seaton says while most large birds will flee if a human gets close, signaling anyone looking for them, a red goshawk “will just stare at you.”

There were only 10 known breeding pairs on the continent 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 Indigenous rangers and traditional owners in the north to identify the birds and monitor activity in their wide nests—built out of sturdy branches on horizontal branches—to see how successful they are at breeding and get a clearer picture on the actual numbers of red goshawks.

Local resident Chris Brogan is a firefighter for Plantation Management Partners 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 tricky to see because their plumage merge with the tree bark,” he comments.

“When I began, I thought they were just another bird. I thought they were widespread. But it’s a bird that’s vanishing.”

Averting Extinction

MacColl was working as an environmental scientist for a mining firm about a ten years back when he first saw a red goshawk nest in Cape York’s west.

“I have been totally obsessed ever since,” he says.

Red goshawks are in a genus of bird that has only one other known member—PNG’s brown-shouldered raptor.

Their power impresses him. A red goshawk that goes to the ground to grab a stick will fly back to a branch high above “vertically,” he says. “They go straight up.”

“There truly is no other bird like it,” says MacColl. “They’re not directly linked to any other bird of prey in Australia—they’re on their own branch of the family tree.

“We are going to need a collaboration of experts together—and the best information possible to know what they require. That’s how we save the species.”