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What White House’s eagle vs. goose post doesn’t show — the Canada goose won that fight

August 27, 2026
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An image shared by the X account for the White House shows an eagle and a goose fighting.

An X post by the White House recently featured no text just an image of a bald eagle, wings spread, staring off into the distance, while standing on the neck of a Canada Goose.

The photo seemed to tell an entire story of dominance and submission. But there was much more to it than that.

“This photo is from a documented 20-minute encounter on frozen Lake Ontario where a bald eagle attacked a Canada goose,” a reader-generated caption under the post soon read, using the correct name for the lake. “The goose fought back and survived after the eagle gave up and retreated.”

It’s true. The goose/eagle faceoff was captured a year and a half ago in Burlington, Ont., by photographer Mervyn Sequeira, who posted numerous pictures of the 20-minute battle to his Instagram account , and was interviewed by media about the event, which was covered by National Post .

“It was like boxers in a ring,” Sequeira said at the time , calling the matchup “very symbolic in the political context.”

“The eagle kept repeatedly attacking, and the goose was hissing and pecking as best it could, defending itself,” he said. “And there were times when it seemed hopeless for the goose … I thought it was over; however it was very, very impressive. The goose fought back and came out of that and survived the day.”

The eagle, meanwhile, flew away.

Responses on social media included several images of a beaver gnawing down a wooden statue of the U.S. president. The official account for Build Canada, a federal agency launched last year to finance affordable housing, responded with another picture from the same series, showing the Canada goose raising its wing in an apparent attack.

This wasn’t the first time the Trump administration has evoked the symbol of America’s national bird, a status that was only made official under legislation signed in 2024 by president Joe Biden. The bird of prey had been an unofficial symbol since the 1700s, and was the name of the country’s first manned lunar lander in 1969.

In June Trump posted an apparently AI-generated image of a golden eagle adorning the White House, calling it “A Golden Gift to the White House for its 250th Birthday Year!” CNN reported that real photos of the White House did not show the bird, and that it had the wrong number of stars on its accompanying shield.

And in February, when the U.S. men’s hockey team beat Canada to take the gold medal at the Winter Olympics, the White House sent out the same eagle/goose image it used this week, over a year-old post from then-prime minister Justin Trudeau that said: “ You can’t take our country — and you can’t take our game.”

The image may not even be an unaltered photograph. Sequeira’s Instagram feed shows 16 photos of the battle, none of which exactly matches the one released by the White House.

There are also similarities between the White House image and a series of photographs taken in 2021 by photographer Patrick Keefe in Prince Edward Island, though again not an exact match. That encounter also made the news , and once again the goose survived.

National Post has reached out to the White House for more information.

Birds neither know nor care what country they are from. But news stories from a decade ago point out that Nova Scotia was instrumental in reviving the fortunes of the bald eagle, which was on the U.S. endangered species list in the 1980s but has since bounced back.

And this month the X account of Global Affairs Canada boasted that Canada is home to 55 per cent of the global bald eagle population. “Roughly 110,000 of these majestic birds can be found across the country, but especially along the west coast,” the agency posted, inviting birders to “drop your best Canadian bird photo!”

In other words, there’s a better than 50 per cent chance the bald eagle in the White House image was hatched in Canada.

Trump’s history with birds of prey took a personal turn in 2015, when a photo shoot for Time magazine in the Oval Office resulted in a bald eagle lunging at the president and causing him to shy away. Trump told Fox News at the time that the eagle didn’t scare him.

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