Heading Towards Extinction ‘Before Our Eyes’: The Quiet Plight of Australia’s Rarest Raptor

Nesting in the tallest tree, often near a waterway, the scarlet raptor hunts beneath the canopy—chasing down speed demons like the colorful parrot and plucking them from the air.

The soft thrum of their strong, expansive, metre-wide wings can be heard from below as they gain speed, before quietly diving and turning like a avian aircraft.

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

“It’s gone extinct all across eastern Australia, unnoticed by many,” states a researcher from the Queensland University and a bird conservation group.

“It was regularly spotted in northern NSW and south-east Queensland until the 2000s, but after that, the sightings have dropped off. 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 behavior of Australia’s most uncommon raptor. Many enthusiasts have never seen one.

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

Dr Richard Seaton, a senior conservationist at a leading bird organization, spent months searching for them in southeast QLD in 2013—returning to locations where they had been recorded just a decade and a half before.

“I didn’t spot any anywhere. So we formed a recovery team,” he notes. “At the time, we were unaware of their territory, what habitats they needed, or really what they were doing or where they were traveling.”

The bird certainly existed as far south as Sydney in the past. In the 1700s, a convict artist named Thomas Watling sketched 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.

Closer to Extinction

In 2023, the national authorities changed the classification of the red goshawk from vulnerable to endangered—labeling it as nearer to dying out—and calculated there were just about 1,300 adults left in the wild. MacColl thinks the actual number 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 region is largely undisturbed, it has its own problems,” says MacColl, who has been researching the bird for seven years.

“I am concerned about climate change and particularly the immense heat and overheating dangers for the young birds. Then there’s the continuing risk of habitat loss from agriculture, forestry, and mining.”

GPS monitoring has revealed that some juveniles take a dangerous 1,500-kilometer flight south to central Australia for about most of the year—perhaps learning how to hunt—before returning for good to their coastal boltholes.

Just why the species has experienced such a swift decline in its range isn’t certain, but Seaton says broken-up environments is probably the cause.

“They seek out the highest perch in the tallest stand, and those stands of trees are increasingly rare any more,” he explains.

The Red Goshawk ‘Stare’

Red goshawks can be hard to spot and have huge home ranges—possibly as big as 600 square kilometers—and would traditionally have always been thinly spread around the landscape, while hugging shorelines and waterways.

They are quiet birds, and Seaton says while most large birds will flee 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 another ten on the Tiwi archipelago (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 native custodians in the north to identify the birds and observe behavior in their wide nests—constructed out of sturdy branches on level limbs—to see how successful they are at breeding and get a better handle on the actual numbers of red goshawks.

Local resident Chris Brogan is a firefighter for Plantation Management Partners on Melville Island and is part of a team that checks on the birds, observing activity at nests over 30-minute periods.

“They’re beautiful, but they can be hard to spot because their colors merge with the trunks of the trees,” he comments.

“When I began, I thought they were just another bird. I believed they were widespread. But it’s a bird that’s vanishing.”

Averting Extinction

MacColl was working as an ecology expert for a mining firm about a decade ago when he first saw a red goshawk nest in Cape York’s west.

“I have been completely captivated 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 power impresses 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 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 family tree.

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