Going Extinct ‘Unnoticed by Many’: The Silent Plight of the Nation’s Rarest Raptor

Nesting in the highest branches, typically near a waterway, the red goshawk pursues prey under the canopy—chasing down speed demons like the colorful parrot and plucking them mid-flight.

The gentle hum of their strong, expansive, wide-spanning wings is audible from below as they accelerate, then quietly diving 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 all across eastern Australia, unnoticed by many,” states Chris MacColl from the University of Queensland and a bird conservation group.

“It was still frequently seen in northern NSW and southeast QLD until the 2000s, but after that, the sightings have dropped off. 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 habits of Australia’s rarest bird of prey. Most birdwatchers have never seen one.

Now, researchers like MacColl are working urgently to understand the number of these birds are left so they can refine efforts to save them.

A bird expert, the director of terrestrial birds at BirdLife Australia, devoted time searching for them in southeast QLD in 2013—returning to sites where they had been observed just 15 years earlier.

“I didn’t spot any anywhere. So we started a conservation group,” he notes. “At the time, we didn’t know their territory, what environments they required, or really what they were doing or where they were going.”

The species certainly existed as far south as Sydney in the past. In the 1700s, a imprisoned painter named Thomas Watling drew the bird from a sample nailed to the side of a settler’s hut in Botany Bay.

That illustration—now stored in a UK museum—was passed to English bird expert John Latham, who used it to formally describe the red goshawk in 1801.

Nearer to Vanishing

In 2023, the national authorities updated the classification of the red goshawk from at risk to endangered—labeling it as nearer to dying out—and calculated there were just about 1,300 mature birds left in the wild. MacColl believes the actual number could be below 1,000.

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

“While that region is mostly intact, it has its own problems,” says MacColl, who has been researching the bird for almost a decade.

“I worry about global warming and especially the extreme temperatures and overheating dangers for the young birds. Then there’s the continuing risk of habitat loss from farming, forestry, and resource extraction.”

GPS monitoring has shown that some juveniles take a risky 1,500km flight south to the Australian interior for about eight months—possibly honing their skills—before coming back for good to their coastal boltholes.

The reason the species has experienced such a swift decline in its range isn’t certain, but Seaton says fragmentation of habitat 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 ‘Stare’

Red goshawks can be hard to spot and have huge home ranges—possibly as big as 600 sq km—and would traditionally have always been thinly spread around the landscape, while staying close to coastal areas and waterways.

They are quiet birds, and Seaton says while many raptors 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 continent this year, Seaton says, with 10 more on the Tiwi Islands (the biggest landmass in the group, Melville, is now regarded as the red goshawk’s main habitat).

A conservation group has been training local guardians and traditional owners in the north to identify the birds and observe behavior in their metre-wide nests—built out of thick sticks on level limbs—to see how effective they are at reproducing and get a better handle on the actual numbers of red goshawks.

Local resident Chris Brogan is a firefighter for a forestry company on Melville Island and is part of a team that checks on the birds, observing activity at nests over half-hour intervals.

“They’re beautiful, but they can be tricky to see because their plumage merge with the tree bark,” he says.

“When I began, I thought 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 decade ago when he first saw a red goshawk nest in Cape York’s west.

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

Red goshawks are in a genus of bird that has only a single relative—PNG’s chestnut-shouldered goshawk.

Their strength amazes him. A red goshawk that heads to the ground to collect a stick will return to a branch 30 metres up “straight up,” he says. “They go straight up.”

“There truly is no other bird like it,” 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 people united—and the best information possible to know what they need. That’s how we save the species.”