Going extinct ‘right under our noses’: the quiet plight of Australia’s rarest bird of prey

Setting up a base in the tallest tree, usually around a creek somewhere, the red goshawk will hunt beneath the canopy – chasing down speed demons such as the rainbow lorikeet and plucking them out of the air.

The soft thrum of their deep, powerful, metre-wide wings can be heard from the ground as they accelerate, before they silently swoop and bank like some feathered fighter jet.

But the spectacle of the red goshawk – a bird that exists nowhere else on Earth – is disappearing from Australia’s landscape.

“It’s gone extinct all across eastern Australia, right under our noses,” says Chris MacColl, a researcher at the University of Queensland and BirdLife Australia.

“It was still frequently seen in northern New South Wales and south-east Queensland up to the 2000s but after that, the records completely disappear. It has fallen off the map.”

Despite the bird being first described in 1801, they were never a common sight and, until recently, relatively little was known about the habits of Australia’s rarest bird of prey. Most birdwatchers have never seen one.

Now scientists such as MacColl are in a race to understand just how many of the birds might be left so they can refine their plans to save them.

Dr Richard Seaton, the director of terrestrial birds at BirdLife Australia, spent months looking for them in south-east Queensland in 2013 – revisiting places where they had been recorded only 15 years earlier.

“I couldn’t find them anywhere. So we started a recovery team,” he says. “At the time, we didn’t know their home range or what habitats they needed or really what they were doing or where they were going.”

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The species certainly existed as far south as Sydney in the past. In the late 18th century, a convict artist called Thomas Watling drew the bird from a specimen nailed 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 British ornithologist John Latham, who used it to formally describe the red goshawk in 1801.

Closer to extinction

In 2023, the federal government changed the status of the red goshawk from vulnerable to endangered – assessing it as being closer to extinction – and estimated there were just 1,300 mature birds left in the wild. MacColl thinks the actual number could be below 1,000.

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

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

“I worry about climate change and particularly the immense heat and thermal threat risk for the young birds. Then there’s the ongoing threat of habitat loss from agriculture, logging and mining.”

Satellite tracking has revealed that some juveniles take a risky 1,500km flight south to central Australia for about eight months – perhaps learning how to hunt – before returning for good to their coastal boltholes.

Just why the species has suffered such a rapid collapse in its range isn’t clear, but Seaton says fragmentation of habitat is likely to blame.

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

The red goshawk ‘glare’

Red goshawks can be hard to spot and have huge home ranges – perhaps as big as 600 sq km – and would historically have always been thinly spread around the landscape, while hugging coastal areas and waterways.

They are not noisy and Seaton says while most large birds will flee if a human gets close, alerting anyone looking for them, a red goshawk “will just glare at you”.

There were only 10 known breeding pairs on the Australian mainland this year, Seaton says, with 10 more on the Tiwi Islands (the largest island in the group, Melville, is now considered the red goshawk’s stronghold).

BirdLife Australia has been training Indigenous rangers and traditional owners in the north to be able to spot the birds and monitor activity in their metre-wide nests – built out of thick sticks on horizontal branches – to see how successful they are at breeding and get a better handle on the actual numbers of red goshawks.

Tiwi islander Chris Brogan is a firefighter for Plantation Management Partners on Melville Island and is part of a team that monitors the birds, checking activity at nests over 30-minute periods.

“They’re beautiful, but they can be hard to spot because their colours blend in with the trunks of the trees,” he says.

“When I started, I thought they were just another bird. I thought they were everywhere. But it’s a bird that’s disappearing.”

Averting extinction

MacColl was working as an environmental scientist for Rio Tinto 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 genus of bird that has only one other known member – Papua New Guinea’s chestnut-shouldered goshawk.

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

“There really is nothing like them,” 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 network of people together – and the best information possible to know what they need. That’s how we avert extinction.”