Did you know that flamingos are not pink? | Travel with Mutai

Did you know that flamingo aren’t pink? Well, actually, they are not.

Lesser flamingo | Picture courtesy

Strange but true: flamingos are born grey and their feathers only turn pink as they eat their preferred diet of the blue-green algae, Spirulina, which contains a natural pink dye called canthaxanthin.

Consequently, flamingos kept in zoos turn from pink to grey, unless they have synthetic canthaxanthin added to their diets.

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Spirulina has a lot to answer for in the life of the flamingo: a periodic low Spirulina count in the waters of their most famous home on Lake Nakuru causes them to migrate north and south to Kenya’s other lakes.

If there’s high  Spirulina count, however, then as many as 1.5 million birds might arrive to create  what famous orinthologists Roger Tory Peterson called, ‘the most fabulous bird spectacle on earth.’

The spectacle comes, however, at a price because an average population of 300,000 flamingos suck around 180 tonnes of Spirulina out of the lake every day. Thats alot of algae. And nor is it always available.

Sometimes, after a long dry period, the level of the water in the lake will reduce and its alkalinity will increase.

This is badnews for the Spirulina, which cannot tolerate too high an alkaline content.

Consequently they shrivel up and die leaving the flamingos with a conundrum: they can deviate from their diet, depart for another lake, or die.

It’s a tough choice and, though the flamingos try to survive on an alternative algae known as Clamydomonas, it’s considerably smaller than Spirulina and slips through the filtering systems of their beaks. So faced with starvation, they have only one choice- to migrate.

Migrating flamingos make for one of nature’s most glorious spectacles. Rising from the lake in choreographed flights of coral pink, they head off in V formation, streaking the blue skies pink, and filling the air with the sound of their honking.

Where do they go?

Any large expanse of water might attract them, but not before they’ve checked it out for Spirulina. And if the menu isn’t up to scratch, they’ll move on in search of better.

Sometimes south, sometimes as far north as up to Lake Turkana, even to Ethiopia and Botswana.

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