Going Extinct ‘Unnoticed by Many’: The Silent Struggle of the Nation’s Most Elusive Raptor

Perched in the highest branches, typically near a creek, the scarlet raptor pursues prey under the canopy—targeting swift prey like the colorful parrot and plucking them from the air.

The gentle hum of their deep, powerful, metre-wide wings can be heard from below as they gain speed, before silently swooping and banking like a avian aircraft.

Yet the spectacle of the red goshawk—a species found only in Australia—is disappearing from the Australian landscape.

“It’s vanished all across eastern Australia, unnoticed by many,” states a researcher from the Queensland University and BirdLife Australia.

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

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, scientists like MacColl are in a race to understand how many of these birds are left so they can refine conservation plans.

A bird expert, the director of terrestrial birds at BirdLife Australia, devoted time looking for them in south-east Queensland in 2013—returning to locations where they had been recorded just 15 years earlier.

“I didn’t spot any anywhere. So we formed a recovery team,” he says. “At the time, we were unaware of their home range, what habitats they needed, or really what they were up to or where they were going.”

The species was present as far south as Sydney in the past. In the 1700s, a imprisoned painter named Thomas Watling drew the bird from a specimen attached to the side of a settler’s hut in Botany Bay.

That illustration—now stored in Britain’s Natural History Museum—found its way to British ornithologist John Latham, who used it to officially name the red goshawk in 1801.

Closer to Extinction

In 2023, the national authorities updated the classification of the red goshawk from vulnerable to critically threatened—assessing it as closer to extinction—and estimated there were just about 1,300 mature birds left in the wild. MacColl thinks the true count 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 on Queensland’s top end.

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

“I worry about global warming and especially the immense heat and overheating dangers for the juveniles. Then there’s the ongoing threat of habitat loss from agriculture, logging, and resource extraction.”

Satellite tracking has shown that some young birds take a dangerous 1,500-kilometer flight south to central Australia for about most of the year—perhaps honing their skills—before coming back for good to their seaside homes.

The reason the species has suffered such a swift decline in its territory isn’t certain, 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 hard to spot and have huge home ranges—possibly 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 not noisy, and Seaton says while most large birds will fly away if a human approaches, alerting anyone searching 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 training Indigenous rangers and native custodians in the north to spot the birds and monitor activity in their metre-wide nests—constructed out of sturdy branches on level limbs—to see how successful 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 a forestry company 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 trunks of the trees,” he says.

“When I started, I assumed they were just another bird. 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 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 a single relative—Papua New Guinea’s brown-shouldered raptor.

Their power impresses him. A red goshawk that goes to the forest floor to grab a stick will fly back to a branch 30 metres up “vertically,” he says. “They go directly upward.”

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

“We are going to need a collaboration of people united—and the best information possible to know what they require. That’s how we avert extinction.”