Claim:
U.S. President Donald Trump posted “Windmills are killing all of our beautiful Bald Eagles!” on social media with an image of a bird that’s not an eagle and not in America.
Rating:
In late December 2025, social media users shared what appeared to be a Truth Social post by U.S. President Donald Trump that read, “Windmills are killing all of our beautiful Bald Eagles!” and included an image of a bird that appeared to be dead in front of several wind turbines.
People shared screenshots of the post to platforms such as Threads (archived), Facebook (archived), Reddit (archived) and X (archived). Many of these posts claimed the image Trump posted was not of a dead bald eagle in the United States, but instead a dead falcon at a wind farm in Israel.
The claim was true. Trump made the post to his Truth Social account (archived), and it was shared by other administration (archived) accounts (archived) on other platforms. The image was not taken in the U.S. and the dead bird was not a bald eagle.
Enlarging the image revealed the first obvious hint that the picture is not from the United States: Text written in the Hebrew alphabet is to the left of the “13” on the wind turbine closest to the dead bird. The Hebrew alphabet is used to write the Hebrew language, which is spoken in Israel.
Snopes used a reverse image search to determine the photo was previously published by two Israeli newspapers, one in 2017 and one in 2022. Another Israeli newspaper published a photo of the same scene from a different angle in 2017. The three newspapers credited the Israel Nature and Parks Authority and identified the bird as a falcon or a kestrel, which is the common name for several birds in the falcon genus. The two images published in 2017 included timestamps establishing them as being taken four minutes apart on Sept. 11, 2017. All of the newspapers wrote that the photo was taken in Israel.
We’ve reached out to the Israel Nature and Parks Authority to confirm it took the photo and for confirmation of the exact species of bird in the photo. This story will be updated if or when we receive a response.
The bird in the photo could easily be identified as a species that wasn’t a bald eagle. The bird lacked the white plumage of an adult bald eagle. Although juvenile bald eagles are brown, the bird in the photo is far smaller than a juvenile bald eagle and has a much smaller, visually different beak than that of a bald eagle at any age. While the bald eagle is not native to Israel, multiple kestrel species are native to the region.
Wind turbines can kill bald eagles, although U.S. law currently requires energy companies to take certain steps to mitigate harm to eagle populations. Additionally, the American bald eagle population has continued to rise over the past two decades at the same time as wind energy production in the U.S. has greatly increased.
Snopes has previously fact-checked a number of other claims regarding wind turbines.
