Perhaps Ben Franklin had a point.

While other founders favored the bald eagle as a national symbol for its strength and majestic beauty, Franklin condemned the bird’s habit of scavenging and stealing food from other animals, calling it lazy and “often very lousy.”

A generation ago, that was rarely a problem. Between hunting, habitat destruction and the pesticide DDT (which led to fragile eggshells that meant many offspring died in incubation), the bald eagle was in danger of extinction. Only about 500 nesting pairs were left in the contiguous United States in the 1960s.

Thankfully, the species has mounted a comeback to 10,000 nesting pairs and is no longer classified as threatened, much less endangered — a striking success story of conservation and federal protection for the bird of prey that graces the nation’s Great Seal.

That rebound, however, has not come without issue: It turns out bald eagles are a real pain in the neck around trash dumps. They can grip all manner of waste, some of it rather vile, and fly away with it from the landfill, only to let it slip over the surrounding neighborhoods.