Birds stole hundreds of quarters from a car wash

The car wash pictured above is  in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Bill Dougherty at Magic Wand Inc., the car wash outfit that installs and maintains these machines, confirmed that birds had indeed been making off with hundreds of quarters per day.  

Mr. Dougherty discovered the Fredericksburg car wash machine was coming up several hundred dollars short per week, he initially suspected his employees of using pass keys to loot the machine. When he set undertook a surveillance mission with a camera in hand to catch the thieves in action he did indeed manage to snap pictures of the perpetrators in the act, but they weren't quite what he expected. Not only were the "thieves" who were stealing the quarters of the avian variety; they were working in tandem to do so: one bird would go up inside the machine to jimmy coins loose, and the other birds would grab them and fly off with them. 



Starlings, the birds pictured here, are often attracted to bright, shiny objects and will collect them for nesting or mate-attraction purposes whenever the opportunity presents itself. Most likely one or more starlings was attracted by the glint of overlooked quarters in the change cup and made off with them; other starlings saw where the quarters were coming from and imitated the behavior, learning in the process how to work as teams to retrieve coins from inside the machine itself.



The claim that an accumulated $4,000 in change was retrieved from the roof of the car wash is an embellishment. The car wash operator did not report finding any such rooftop stash, although his discovering a few hundred quarters on the ground around the machine some mornings was not uncommon.