One man, a passionate ornithologist called Derek Ratcliffe started to investigate. He focused on the collapse in the peregrine falcon population and, in 1966, his detective work brought him to these very trays here in the Natural History Museum. Hi, how are you doing? Hello. Today the curator of the egg collections is Douglas Russell. He came to the Natural History Museum and he began to look at what the eggs looked like and their dimensions and eggshell thickness and all the parameters around the eggs in the period before DDT was released. And that's what this series allowed him to do. Ratcliffe spent hours alone, studying these eggs that pre-dated the use of DDT. His initial study just came in and started to weigh eggshells, so that he would begin to take out an eggshell, work out what the weight of that particular shell was and then take shells which he was collecting from the wild at that point, as part of the peregrine studies and suddenly realised, gosh, this shell is significantly lighter than shells that were being laid 30 years ago.


一位充满激情的鸟类学家，德里克·雷克里夫展开了调查。他主要研究一种数量急剧减少的游隼，1966年他的侦查工作引领他来到了自然史博物馆。 -你好 -你好 这是蛋类收藏品管理员，道格拉斯·罗素。他来到自然史博物馆，开始观察蛋的外观，尺寸以及蛋壳的厚度，这些蛋的资料都是在滴滴涕污染前收集的，他的工作就由此展开。 雷克里夫独自工作了几个小时，研究滴滴涕使用前的禽蛋。研究一开始，他先给蛋壳称重，拿出一个蛋壳，计算出这种特殊蛋壳的重量，然后再拿出他在野外收集的游隼蛋，将蛋壳称重并比较。然后他突然发现，这个比30年前的蛋壳要明显轻很多。