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 earlier 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 Ben Sheldon, who studies birds as a professor of ornithology at the University of Oxford.
Hundreds of thousands of birds die each year because of 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”.
-Agence France-Presse
