With its tidy brick farmhouse and adjacent red barn, Old Homestead Farm in Waterville, Vt., looks more like a New England postcard than a crime scene. But it's one of the latest victims in a bizarre string of thefts.

Earlier this summer, someone sneaked onto the farm, scaled the barn roof and stole a copper-and-zinc weather vane that had flown from the 40-foot high cupola for more than 150 years, replacing it with a cheap replica.

"You wouldn't think there'd be any crime out here, but there is,"said Elaine Thomas, who owns the farm with husband Dennis. "I just wish he'd taken the SUV, or a bicycle or a canoe. Things we could replace."

In a puzzling series of whodunits, weather vanes like the Thomases' are turning up missing. More than 20 have been stolen in recent years in New England and New York.

"Those are just the reported cases," said Sgt. John Flannigan, a spokesman for the Vermont State Police. "I just wonder how many of these may have occurred and may not have been reported to the authorities. They may not even know it."

In the Old Homestead Farm case, police believe the thieves used climbing gear to get up to the cupola and removed the horse-shaped weather vane.

They apparently installed the replacement in hopes of duping the farm's owners long enough for the original to be sold into an antiques market that now views weather vanes as prized pieces of American folk art.

One day in June, Thomas's daughter noticed the antique weather vane was gone.

"I just screamed 'That's not our horse," Elaine Thomas said. "I knew instantly."

The value of antique weather vanes is apparently what's driving the thefts, which have been reported in New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusetts, Vermont and New York.

A weather vane depicting a locomotive that once sat atop the Woonsocket, R.I., train station recently sold at auction for $1.2 million.

State and federal authorities in New Hampshire are investigating weather vane thefts, but it's unclear whether they are the work of the same people responsible for any of the others.

Concord vane runs to Florida

Since January of 2005, at least three thefts have been reported in Massachusetts, one in York, Maine, and at least one in Concord, N.H., where police investigating one theft tracked it to Florida and recovered it.

The Concord police are working with the U.S. Postal Inspection Service on another case involving a stolen weather vane, but officials refused to comment, saying it was an active investigation.

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