Bird Brain Thieves

I have received e-mails about birds doing all sorts of interesting things: Clever things, spiritual things, scary things, and more. But one of my favorite e-stories is the one to follow. I checked out the story’s authenticity on http://www.snopes.com/ and found that, though the e-mail versions of the story have some inaccuracies, or have apparently been “embellished,” the core of the story is actually quite true!

In Fredericksburg, Virginia, a man named Bill Dougherty has a company which installs coin machines. An owner of one of the car wash facilities Bill's company installed a machine for called Bill with a complaint: He was having problems with theft from his change machines. In fact, he had lost probably thousands of quarters over the course of time, and could not identify the culprit. The car wash owner even suspected some of Bill's employees of possibly being the perpetrators.

Mr. Dougherty set out to identify the thieves, to catch them in the act of stealing, in fact, by setting up surveillance cameras. And what a surprise he got: The film certainly caught the thieves in the act – but these thieves’ vehicle of escape came in the form of wings. The thieves were, in fact, birds!

What Mr. Dougherty discovered, was that one of these remarkably brilliant birds was entering right up into the machine from the coin tray. He would work his way up into the mechanisms of the coin machine in order to retrieve quarters, coin after coin! The bird's accomplices would then fly off with the loot. Mr. Dougherty reported that many mornings he would find hundreds of quarters on the ground below the machines. Some birds would fly off with as many as three quarters in their beaks at one time. According to snopes.com, the birds were making off with hundreds of coins per day!

I found it amusing that these birds were demonstrating such an intelligence as this. The sort of birds who were enjoying the “coin play” are called Starlings. This variety of bird is known for its attraction to “shiny objects.” The shiny trays of the coin machines and the sparkle of the coins became their ideal playground. …So much for calling someone with limited intelligence a “Bird Brain!”