President Trump blames windmills for killing bald eagles, but the photo is from Israel and shows a falcon, not the US national bird.
WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump has blamed wind turbines for killing iconic American bald eagles in a year’s end social media post.
His Truth Social post on Tuesday featured a zoomed-in image of a bird on rocky ground beneath a wind turbine, with the caption “Windmills are killing all of our beautiful Bald Eagles!”
The official White House account and the US Department of Energy both shared the post on X, amplifying his latest attack on wind energy.
However, the same photo appeared in a 2017 article from the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, which credited it to the Israel Nature and Parks Authority.
The Israeli agency said the bird was a falcon, and writing visible on one of the turbines in the photo is in Hebrew.
Some of the Republican leader’s critics pounced on the mix-up, with California Governor Gavin Newsom posting, “Dozy Don doesn’t know what America’s bird looks like???”
Two independent experts consulted by AFP agreed the bird of prey in the photo was not a bald eagle.
“It is definitely not a Bald Eagle,” said Ben Sheldon, a professor of ornithology at the University of Oxford.
The experts said the animal depicted is smaller and has a different colour and bill structure, likely making it a Eurasian kestrel.
Hundreds of thousands of birds die each year to wind turbines in the United States, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The university noted in 2023 that these fatalities represent a tiny fraction o
