President Donald Trump on Friday once again misidentified the national bird he repeatedly claims to care about.
Three days after suggesting that a falcon in Israel was a bald eagle in America, Trump was back posting on Truth Social about why he doesn’t want to see any more wind turbines being built. Yet he still couldn’t manage to find an accurate photo.
“Eagles going down!” he wrote in a post showing a dead bird at the base of a wind turbine. However, the bird is a red kite, the location is Spain, and the image is at least 15 years old, according to a 2010 Telegraph article titled, “Wind turbines: ‘Eco-friendly’ - but not to eagles.”
In a post just one minute earlier, Trump was less specific—and therefore more accurate—when he captioned a photo of an unidentified avian species flying near a wind turbine, “killing birds by the millions!” Changhua Coast Conservation Action, the uploader of the 2006 photo, said the turbine was inactive at the time and no birds were hurt.
Wind turbines do kill between 700,000 and 1 million birds annually, according to the American Bird Conservancy, which says that “collision with human-made structures such as poorly sited towers, powerlines, and wind turbines is one of the leading causes of Bald Eagle mortality.”
The White House did not immediately respond to the Daily Beast, which asked how many more times Trump will post about eagles while using photographs of other birds.
Trump, 79, should know what bald eagles look like. During a 2015 photo shoot for TIME magazine, he was filmed letting one perch on his gloved hand and on his desk at Trump Tower. When he reached for some aspirin near its talons, the bird flapped its wings and objected, causing Trump to retreat.
Since then, it seems Trump’s only hands-on experience with live birds occurs during the annual Thanksgiving pardon ceremony.
