deadheader

Instead, she is a weeder, actually for enjoyment ("That's when I get some of my best thinking done"), a keen harvester of flowers for the house, and a merciless deadheader of perennials in the autumn.

There's company rules against riders. I told him tonight he's gonna have a deadheader; all he wanted to know was you gonna have coffee money.

From Granite City, I think it was, we rode a deadheader to Minneapolis.

...were always the "infamous machine" or the "bosses' candidate" or the "payroll deadheaders and racketeers."

Don does this to catch "Deadheaders" - birds which circle the wrong way and won't leave the release site. By his precise records, Don can remove deadheaders by a process of elimination.