Heading Extinct ‘Right Under Our Noses’: The Quiet Plight of the Nation’s Rarest Raptor

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

The gentle hum of their deep, powerful, metre-wide wings is audible from below as they gain speed, then silently swooping and turning like a feathered fighter jet.

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

“It’s gone extinct throughout eastern Australia, right under our noses,” explains Chris MacColl from the University of Queensland and a bird conservation group.

“It was regularly spotted in northern NSW and southeast QLD until the 2000s, but after that, the sightings completely disappear. It has fallen off the map.”

Despite the bird being first described in 1801, it was never a common sight and, until recently, not much was known about the habits of Australia’s rarest bird of prey. Most birdwatchers have never seen one.

Now, researchers like MacColl are in a race to determine the number of these birds are left so they can improve conservation plans.

A bird expert, the director of terrestrial birds at a leading bird organization, 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 started a recovery team,” he notes. “At the time, we were unaware of their home range, what habitats they required, or really what they were doing or where they were going.”

The bird certainly existed as far south as Sydney in the past. In the 1700s, a imprisoned painter named Thomas Watling sketched 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—was passed to English bird expert John Latham, who used it to officially name the red goshawk in 1801.

Nearer to Vanishing

In 2023, the federal government updated the status of the red goshawk from vulnerable to endangered—assessing it as closer to extinction—and calculated there were just about 1,300 adults left in the wild. MacColl thinks 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 in the west to Cape York Peninsula on Queensland’s top end.

“While that area is largely undisturbed, it has its own issues,” says MacColl, who has been studying the bird for almost a decade.

“I am concerned about global warming and particularly the immense heat and thermal threat risk for the juveniles. Then there’s the ongoing threat of environmental destruction from agriculture, forestry, and resource extraction.”

GPS monitoring has shown that some juveniles 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 rapid collapse in its territory isn’t clear, but Seaton says fragmentation of habitat is likely to blame.

“They seek out the highest perch in the largest grove, and those wooded areas are increasingly rare any more,” he says.

The Red Goshawk ‘Glare’

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 shorelines and rivers.

They are not noisy, and Seaton says while most large birds will flee if a human approaches, signaling anyone searching 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 archipelago (the biggest landmass in the group, Melville, is now considered the red goshawk’s stronghold).

BirdLife Australia has been training local guardians and traditional owners in the north to identify the birds and observe behavior in their metre-wide nests—constructed out of thick sticks on level limbs—to see how successful they are at reproducing and get a better handle on the true population of red goshawks.

Local resident 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 hard to spot because their plumage merge with the tree bark,” he says.

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

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 western Cape York.

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

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

Their power amazes him. A red goshawk that heads to the forest floor to collect a stick will fly back 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 bird of prey in Australia—they’re on their own branch of the evolutionary 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 avert extinction.”