A Trump. A Dead Duck. And an Uproar in Italy.

President Trump has enraged his opponents in the United States by pardoning Jan. 6 defendants, investigating his enemies and revoking security clearances. But in Italy, it is a different Trump who has set off a furor, wearing a camouflage beanie and sitting in a hole in the ground.

Italian lawmakers have accused Donald J. Trump Jr., the president’s son, of hunting a protected duck in Venice’s lagoon.

“It is morally despicable,” Luana Zanella, a lawmaker in Italy’s parliament said on Tuesday. “And it’s a crime.”

The fury among environmental activists in Venice started on Monday, when they obtained a video showing a group of hunters, including Mr. Trump, shooting ducks in the Venice lagoon. In a clip, which they shared with The New York Times, Mr. Trump, an avid hunter, is hiding among tall grass beside a pile of dead ducks, and describes his prey as an action movie soundtrack plays in the background.

“This is a rather uncommon duck for the area,” he says, pointing at a copper colored duck corpse at his left. “Not even sure what it is in English.”

Others were more sure.

“It’s a ruddy shelduck,” said Andrea Zanoni, a regional lawmaker in the northern Veneto region. “And you cannot hunt it.”

Mr. Zanoni declined to say from whom he obtained the clip, but said that on Tuesday that he reported the killing of the duck to Venice’s carabinieri police in charge of wildlife. From the video, which was later widely published in the Italian news media, it was not clear whether Mr. Trump had shot the protected duck himself.

Andy Surabian, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, said in a statement that it was “unclear whether this single duck was unintentionally shot by someone in Don’s hunting group, another hunting group or killed in a different manner and retrieved by the groups hunting dog.” But he added that “Don takes following all rules, regulations and conservation on his hunts very seriously and plans on fully cooperating with any investigation.”

For Italian lawmakers, the fact that Mr. Trump had the duck among his quarry was enough to provoke an inquiry. According to Italian law, “anyone who kills, captures or detains” protected birds can face up to eight months in jail or a fine of up to more than $2,000. While the future of the legal action remained unclear, lawmakers demanded answers, given that the hunter was a public figure.

“The Meloni government’s good relationship with the Trump administration cannot in any way transform our country into the personal garden of the U.S. President,” three lawmakers with Italy’s populist Five Star Movement wrote in a statement.

Mr. Zanoni filed an official query to the president of the Veneto region on the matter, and Ms. Zanella submitted one to Italy’s justice minister, Italy’s foreign minister and Italy’s environment minister, she said.

Mr. Zanoni, who first denounced the shooting of the migratory bird, has been on many hunters’ trails.

A vegetarian and animal rights activist who said he helped bring 150 lawsuits against hunters over 20 years, Mr. Zanoni trained with Italy’s superior institute for environmental protection to recognize bird breeds.

“I recognized the duck immediately,” he said. ENPA, Italy’s animal protection league, independently confirmed that the bird was indeed a ruddy shelduck. The bird, which according to the British Trust of Ornithology is protected in some Buddhist countries because its color resembles that of a monk’s robes, is a rare sight in that part of Italy, experts say, while it’s more common in Southeastern Europe.

It is not the first time celebrity hunters had visited the area.

In 2009, Mr. Zanoni reported King Juan Carlos of Spain to the police for hunting in a nearby area, which requires a permit. That happened before the king broke his hip while elephant hunting in Botswana and after he denied shooting a drunken Russian bear.

In 2022, Stanley Tucci appeared in an episode of his series about Italian food, “Searching for Italy,” in a coppola cap hidden in a hole on the ground of an islet in Venice’s lagoon as his partner, Oliver Martini, shot down ducks. But the two did not appear to shoot at any protected bird to turn them into duck ragu.

Mr. Martini, a former racing driver and a fish farmer, also appears in the clip of Mr. Trump’s endeavors. He did not respond to a request for comment.

The clip is part of a longer video featuring Mr. Trump and his companions by Field Ethos, a group of self-described “old-school adventurers who make no apologies for who we are,” according to its website. Mr. Trump is a founder of the group, it says.

The group posted a promotional trailer of the Venice trip on YouTube on Dec. 31, but it has not published the longer video or the clip of Mr. Trump with the protected bird on any of its publicly facing platforms.

A member of the trip, who is also part of Field Ethos and spoke on condition of anonymity, said that the video was set to be published later this year but that “we don’t know if we are going to release it or not now that it has obviously upset so many people.”

The Field Ethos social media pages feature several other videos of Mr. Trump advertising hunting gear.

Mr. Trump had attracted criticism for his hunting in the past, especially after a picture emerged from a 2020 hunting trip to Zimbabwe, where the president’s son holds a knife in one hand and the bloody tail of an elephant in the other.

Animal rights groups, including People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, were enraged. But Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter that “I’m not going to run and hide because the PETA crazies don’t like me.”

Aritz Parra contributed reporting from London.