🔗 Share this article

Perched in the highest branches, typically near a waterway, the red goshawk pursues prey under the canopy—chasing down swift prey like the rainbow lorikeet and snatching them from the air.

The soft thrum of their strong, expansive, metre-wide wings is audible from below as they accelerate, before quietly diving and turning like a avian aircraft.

Yet the spectacle of the red goshawk—a species found nowhere else on Earth—is vanishing from the Australian landscape.

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

“It was regularly spotted in northern NSW and south-east Queensland until the 2000s, but since then, 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 recently, 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 working urgently to determine the number of these birds remain so they can refine efforts to save them.

A bird expert, a senior conservationist at a leading bird organization, devoted time looking for them in southeast QLD in 2013—returning to locations where they had been observed just 15 years earlier.

“I couldn’t find them anywhere. So we started a conservation group,” he notes. “At the time, we were unaware of their territory, what environments they required, or really what they were doing or where they were traveling.”

The bird was present as far south as Sydney in the past. In the 1700s, a convict artist named Thomas Watling sketched the bird from a specimen nailed to the side of a settler’s hut in Botany Bay.

That illustration—now housed in a UK museum—was passed to British ornithologist John Latham, who used it to formally describe the red goshawk in 1801.

Closer to Extinction

In 2023, the national authorities changed the status of the red goshawk from at risk to critically threatened—assessing it as nearer to dying out—and calculated there were just about 1,300 mature birds left in the wild. MacColl thinks the true count could be below 1,000.

The bird’s breeding areas 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 largely undisturbed, it has its own problems,” says MacColl, who has been studying the bird for almost a decade.

“I worry about climate change and particularly the extreme temperatures and thermal threat risk for the young birds. Then there’s the continuing risk of habitat loss from farming, forestry, and mining.”

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

Just why the species has experienced such a rapid collapse in its territory isn’t clear, but Seaton says broken-up environments is probably the cause.

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

The Red Goshawk ‘Glare’

Red goshawks can be difficult to see and have huge home ranges—perhaps as big as 600 square kilometers—and would historically have always been thinly spread around the landscape, while hugging shorelines and waterways.

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

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

A conservation group has been training local guardians and native custodians in the north to spot the birds and monitor activity in their metre-wide nests—constructed out of thick sticks on level limbs—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 a forestry company 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 merge with the trunks of the trees,” he says.

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

Averting Extinction

MacColl was working as an environmental scientist for Rio Tinto about a decade ago when he initially spotted 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 a single relative—Papua New Guinea’s chestnut-shouldered goshawk.

Their strength amazes him. A red goshawk that goes to the ground to collect a stick will fly back to a branch 30 metres up “vertically,” he says. “They go directly upward.”

“There really is nothing like them,” says MacColl. “They’re not directly linked 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 best information possible to know what they require. That’s how we save the species.”