Even while on holiday at his Florida resort, Donald Trump has refused to take a break from his unrelenting war on wind energy.
Late Tuesday, the US president posted an image of a dead bird beneath a turbine on social media, accompanied by the lament: “Windmills are killing all of our beautiful Bald Eagles!”
The post was immediately amplified by an official White House account on X with more than a million followers.
Unfortunately for Trump’s effort to sow outrage among American patriots at what he proclaimed to be an image of the national bird laid low, closer inspection reveals the photograph does not show a bald eagle and was not taken in the United States. The image actually shows a falcon that was killed at a wind farm in Israel eight years ago.
In his rush to post the image on his social media platform, Trump overlooked a pair of visual clues that might have given him pause. The first is that the bird is missing the distinctive markings of a bald eagle. The second is that the turbine blamed for its death appears to have Hebrew writing on it.
A quick survey of Israeli wind farms blamed for bird deaths reveals that the image in question was indeed taken by Hedy Ben Eliahou, an employee of Israel’s Nature and Parks Authority, and was featured in a 2017 report in Haaretz, the Tel Aviv news outlet.
Had Trump, or someone working for one of the 18 US intelligence agencies that report to him, traced the image back to its source, he would likely have been gratified to read that the Israeli parks and nature department shares his concern that wind energy comes at the cost of bird deaths. “Wind turbines cause significant damage to bird and bat life in Israel, beyond the level deemed tolerable by nature authorities,” Haaretz reported.
The newspaper added that Israeli wind turbines kill about two dozen birds a year and concerns about the death toll at the time had prompted zoos running an eagle-breeding program to campaign against a plan to build a wind turbine farm in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, “for fear of harm to the already seriously endangered vulture population there”.
