Going Towards Extinction ‘Unnoticed by Many’: The Silent Plight of the Nation’s Rarest Bird of Prey

Nesting in the highest branches, often near a waterway, the red goshawk pursues prey under the canopy—targeting swift prey like the rainbow lorikeet and plucking them mid-flight.

The soft thrum of their strong, expansive, wide-spanning wings can be heard from below as they gain speed, before quietly diving and banking like a feathered fighter jet.

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

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

“It was regularly spotted in northern New South Wales and south-east Queensland up to the 2000s, but since then, the sightings have dropped off. It has fallen off the map.”

Although the bird being first described in 1801, it was never a common sight and, until modern times, relatively little was known about the habits of Australia’s rarest bird of prey. Many enthusiasts have never seen one.

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

A bird expert, a senior conservationist 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 15 years earlier.

“I didn’t spot any anywhere. So we formed a conservation group,” he notes. “At the time, we were unaware of their territory, what environments they needed, or truly what they were up to or where they were traveling.”

The species was present as far south as Sydney in the past. In the late 18th century, a imprisoned painter named Thomas Watling drew the bird from a sample attached to the side of a settler’s hut in Botany Bay.

That drawing—now housed in Britain’s Natural History Museum—found its way to English bird expert 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 critically threatened—labeling it as closer to extinction—and estimated there were just about 1,300 adults left in the wild. MacColl thinks 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 top end.

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

“I worry about global warming and particularly the extreme temperatures and thermal threat risk for the young birds. Then there’s the ongoing threat of environmental destruction 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 learning how to hunt—before coming back for good to their coastal boltholes.

The reason the species has experienced such a swift decline in its range isn’t clear, but Seaton says broken-up environments is likely to blame.

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

The Red Goshawk ‘Glare’

Red goshawks can be hard to spot and have huge home ranges—perhaps 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 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 ten recorded pairs on the continent this year, Seaton reports, with 10 more on the Tiwi Islands (the biggest landmass in the group, Melville, is now regarded as the red goshawk’s main habitat).

BirdLife Australia has been training Indigenous rangers and native custodians 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 effective they are at reproducing and get a better handle on the true population of red goshawks.

Local resident Chris Brogan is a firefighter for Plantation Management Partners 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 blend in with the tree bark,” he comments.

“When I began, I assumed they were just common. I thought they were everywhere. But it’s a bird that’s vanishing.”

Averting Extinction

MacColl was working as an ecology expert for Rio Tinto about a decade ago when he initially spotted a red goshawk nest in western Cape York.

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

Red goshawks are in a genus of bird that has only one other known member—Papua New Guinea’s chestnut-shouldered goshawk.

Their power amazes him. A red goshawk that goes to the ground to collect a stick will fly back to a perch 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 raptor in Australia—they’re on their unique limb of the family tree.

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