. . .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.

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.”