"Rob Ridings, longtime owner of the Shop & Wash car wash where the incident took place, vouched for its authenticity in an interview with the Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star in November 2005. As Ridings tells it, the saga began when he arrived at work one morning in May 1995 to find quarters strewn around the parking lot. At first he thought someone had broken into the vending machines on the property, but the locks were still intact. When he discovered bits of straw and weeds in the coin slot of the money changer the next day, it dawned on him that the culprits might not be human.
He returned with his camera and succeeded in snapping about 18 pictures of the burglars — a small flock of starlings, as it turned out — emptying coins out of the machine so they could build a nest in the change cup. "They were working as a gang," Ridings told the Free Lance-Star. "It was just fun to actually see it going on."
After trying various methods to discourage them, he finally succeeded by stuffing a cloth into the coin chute. Unable to remove it, the birds eventually gave up and never returned."
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