Trump gets wrong country, wrong bird in windmill rant
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US President Donald Trump complained about the fate of the US' bald eagles in a social media post featuring a photo of another breed of bird in Israel.
SCREENSHOT, PHOTO: X, DOUG MILLS/NYTIMES
Follow topic:
- Donald Trump falsely claimed wind turbines kill bald eagles, using an old photo from Israel showing a falcon or vulture, not an eagle.
- The photo, debunked by experts and traced to a 2017 Israeli article, sparked criticism, including from California Governor Gavin Newsom.
- While wind turbines do kill birds, fatalities are a small fraction compared to other causes, according to MIT research.
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WASHINGTON – US President Donald Trump has blamed wind turbines for killing iconic American bald eagles in a year’s end social media post that hit on one of his pet peeves.
There were two problems with this latest lament: the picture in his Truth Social post on Dec 30 was taken years ago in Israel, and it is not a bald eagle.
AFP reviewed the post, where Mr Trump shared a zoomed-in image of a bird on rocky ground beneath a wind turbine, writing: “Windmills are killing all of our beautiful bald eagles!”
The bald eagle is the national bird of the US and appears on its seal, currency, stamps and military insignia.
An official White House account and the US Department of Energy both shared the post on social media platform X, amplifying the latest attack on the wind energy sector from Mr Trump, who has long opposed the power-generating turbines he claims are unsightly, expensive and dangerous to wildlife.
But the same photo appeared in a 2017 article from the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, which credited it to the Israel Nature and Parks Authority and said the bird was a falcon. The agency had included the image a month prior in a Hebrew-language Facebook post mentioning vultures.
Writing visible on one of the wind 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 that the bird of prey in the photo was not a bald eagle, which live in North America and are known for their large size and white heads.
The animal depicted is smaller and has a different colour and bill structure.
The experts said it was more likely a Eurasian kestrel, a type of falcon, while noting that Eurasian griffon vultures are also common in Israel.
“It is definitely not a bald eagle,” said ornithology professor Ben Sheldon, from the University of Oxford, who studies birds.
Hundreds of thousands of birds die each year to wind turbines in the US, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, though the university wrote in 2023 that these fatalities “represent a tiny fraction of the birds killed annually in other ways, like flying into buildings or caught by prowling house cats”. AFP
A bald eagle perching on a branch covered in snow in Nyack, New York, on Dec 14.
PHOTO: REUTERS
