Greater Flamingo

The pale pink tide that sweeps the Walvis Bay lagoon each year is the greater flamingo, the largest and most widespread of the flamingos, standing up to a meter and a half on legs that seem borrowed from a taller bird. The species numbers in the hundreds of thousands worldwide, and coastal Namibia hosts some of the greatest gatherings in southern Africa, tens of thousands feeding in the shallows alongside their smaller, deeper-pink cousins. The color is diet, carotenoids from the invertebrates it filters; a flamingo eats its way pink. When the inland pans flood after good rains, flocks commute hundreds of kilometers overnight to breed on the mud, one of the region's least witnessed spectacles.