Bird-skin bandits strike English museum

Somebody's been feathering their nest with an irreplaceable English archive of rare tropical bird skins.

Curators of the Natural History Museum in Hertfordshire, northwest of London, say thieves have stolen about 300 of the most brightly colored specimens from a vast collection assembled over centuries.

Detectives investigating the raid said Thursday they hope to recover the bird skins.

They suspect that the thieves could have been working on behalf of a collector or planning to use the birds' plumage to make fishing lures, dresses or costume jewelry.

However, curators say the raiders didn't touch any of the museum's 8,000 birds collected by Charles Darwin when he was developing his theory of evolution.