It turned out that the gull, a female breeding on the Farallon Islands west of San Francisco Bay, had hitched a ride on a garbage truck bound for an organic composting facility in the Central Valley near Modesto. At first the researcher thought the bird might have gotten trapped in the truck. But then, two days later, the same thing happened. Clearly, this gull was using its head (if not its palate—as one Bay Area news reporter quipped,
