The Christian Science Monitor

In 'The Feather Thief,' a British bird burglary exposes a hidden world

In the summer of 2009, avian anxiety engulfs a pair of bird-obsessed men in England.

One is an Englishman who curates a prominent British bird collection. He arrives at work at the Natural History Museum at Tring to discover someone has broken in overnight, almost certainly to steal its rare and priceless specimens. Maybe the burglar swiped Charles Darwin's famous finches or pilfered the skeletons of the famously extinct Dodo and Great Auk. Worst of all, the museum's copy of "Birds of America" – one

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