Flamingos Aren't Born Pink

A flamingo fresh out of the egg is a ball of grey down, with no trace of the colour that will make it famous. The pink comes later, and it comes from the menu: the algae and tiny crustaceans it filters from the water are loaded with carotenoids, the same pigments that colour carrots. Its liver processes them and deposits them in feathers and skin, until the whole bird lights up.

That's why the colour is a gauge of its life. In zoos, the diet has to be reinforced with pigments; on other food, a flamingo slowly dims until it turns whitish.

And there's an even better detail: flamingos feed their chicks a kind of milk produced in their crop, also loaded with pigment. Raising a chick literally fades them: during those weeks the parents lose colour while the chick gains it. The pink isn't an ornament; it's an inheritance, passed on sip by sip.